Pakistan foreign minister to attend regional moot in India

ISLAMABAD (AA) – Pakistan has announced that Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) meeting to be held on May 4-5 in the southwestern Indian state of Goa.

This will be the first visit by a Pakistani foreign minister to India since 2011, when the then top diplomat Hina Rabbani Khar, now Zardari’s deputy, visited India.

During a weekly briefing in Islamabad, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said the foreign minister is attending the SCO CFM meeting at the invitation of its current chair, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

“Our participation in the meeting reflects Pakistan’s commitment to the SCO Charter and processes and the importance that Pakistan accords to the region in its foreign policy priorities,” she said.

Zardari had attended the CFM’s last meeting in July last year in Tashkent, Tajikistan’s capital.

Relations between the two nuclear neighbors have been at an all-time low since August 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government scrapped Article 370 and Article 35A of the Indian Constitution, which had granted Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir a special status. Following the move, several Kashmiri leaders were put under arrest to crush dissent.

Subsequently, Islamabad suspended all exports and trade relations and reduced diplomatic ties with New Delhi.

Earlier, this ban was only limited to Israel, with which Pakistan has no diplomatic or trade relations.

Disputed region

Kashmir is largely occupied by India, against the wishes of the overwhelming Muslim majority of the region. Pakistan also holds a smaller part of the territory known as “Azad” (Free) Kashmir. Both countries lay full claim to the area, which happens to be an “unfinished agenda” of the partition of India by the British in 1947. A small sliver of Kashmir is also held by China.

Since they were partitioned in 1947, the two countries have fought three wars – in 1948, 1965, and 1971 – two of them over Kashmir.

The Kashnmiris have been denied their fundamental right of self-determination.

Many Kashmiri groups in Jammu and Kashmir have been fighting against oppressive Indian rule for independence, or unification with neighboring Pakistan.

According to several human rights groups, close to 100,000 people have been killed by the occupying Indian forces so far.