Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan’s top diplomat has embarked on the first visit to India by the country’s foreign minister in 12 years.
Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari arrived in the city of Goa on Thursday to attend the two-day meeting of foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
It was the first time a Pakistani foreign minister set foot in India since 2011. Hina Rabbani Khar, currently Pakistan’s minister of state for foreign affairs, was the last to visit Pakistan’s eastern neighbor .
The SCO is a political and security bloc in Asia whose members are Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
The foreign ministers’ meeting on Thursday and Friday will be followed by the main Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in July, where leaders of SCO nations are expected to arrive in India .
Observers said that the Pakistani foreign minister’s visit to India should be seen through the prism of the multilateral SCO meeting rather than assuming any bilateral implications on his trip.
Mosharraf Zaidi of the Islamabad-based policy think tank Tabadlab said Bhutto-Zardari in India is just “an attendance at the SCO meeting”.
“It is neither intended to be a bilateral moment nor can it generate more than aesthetics in terms of interventions between Pakistani and Indian officials,” Zaidi told Al Jazeera.
A difficult relationship
The Bhutto-Zardari visit to India comes at a time when the relationship between the two neighbors is as close to rock bottom as it has been in years.
In December, Bhutto-Zardari traded barbs with his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in New York City at the United Nations.
India’s foreign minister called Pakistan the “epicenter of terrorism”, which Bhutto-Zardari countered by calling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the “butcher of Gujarat”, referring to his as chief minister of that state when religious riots in 2002 killed nearly 2,000 people. people, mostly Muslims.
The two South Asian rivals have historically had a rocky relationship, particularly in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which was divided between the two in 1947 after the end of British rule.
Pakistan has strongly protested Modi’s Hindu nationalist government’s unilateral decision in August 2019 to revoke Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted partial autonomy to Indian-administered Kashmir.
In February of that year, the two nuclear-armed nations came to the brink of war when an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir killed more than 40 paramilitary soldiers.
“Deep Freeze” State
After Bhutto-Zardari’s decision to attend the SCO meeting was announced last month, Jaishankar indicated that there was no bilateral meeting with his Pakistani counterpart in Goa.
“Regarding this particular meeting, we are both members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, so we normally attend their meetings. We are the chairman this year, so the meeting will be held in India this year Jaishankar told reporters during a visit to the Central American nation of Panama.
However, Fahd Humayun, an assistant professor of political science at Tufts University in the United States, said the Bhutto-Zardari visit still has significance.
“The visit signals Pakistan’s stakes not only in multilateralism but also in the SCO as a key geopolitical arrangement in Asia,” he told Al Jazeera.
Humayun added that the state of “freeze” between the two neighbors is likely to remain unchanged due to the situation on the ground in the wake of India’s decision on Article 370.
“India’s rhetoric against Pakistan in international forums remains incendiary,” Humayun said. “Therefore, the foreign minister’s visit … says more about the actions Pakistan puts in the SCO than it does about India-Pakistan relations.”
Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said it was “highly unlikely” that any meaningful talks would take place between the two foreign ministers.
“The visit is significant in the sense that, in fact, it is happening. The fact that a Pakistani foreign minister is coming to Indian soil is important in itself,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Limited coercive capacity”
Founded in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not include any countries in the Western world. It is also unique in that it attempts to balance relations between countries that otherwise do not see eye-to-eye, such as India and China or India and Pakistan.
Singh said for India just holding the meeting on its soil will be seen as a success.
“India will not want to spoil SCO in any way or let it be a failure,” he said. “We’re going to see simple, bland statements coming out of it. The effort is to show that India is a global power and can hold these meetings, which is the ultimate goal.”
Zaidi said he sees the SCO as a “useful forum” to resolve regional issues, but added that the tendency in New Delhi is to insist on purely bilateral mechanisms when it comes to its relationship with Pakistan.
“As the economic gap between Pakistan and India grows ever wider, the incentives for India to negotiate with Pakistan shrink ever more,” Zaidi said. “SCO has very limited coercive capacity, and China is unlikely to want to push India on any front other than pre-existing Sino-Indian issues.”
In the wake of the Ukraine war and the evolution of the global political calculus it has caused, new alliances have emerged. The United States is increasingly courting India as a counterweight to China at a time when India and China are clashing over border territories, while Islamabad remains one of Beijing’s staunchest allies.
For Kamran Bokhari, senior director of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, DC, managing its relations with China will be the most important task for both India and Pakistan.
“The common denominator in terms of challenges for the two South Asian rivals is the intensification of strategic competition between the US and China, albeit in very different ways,” he told Al Jazeera.
“For Pakistan, the challenge is how not to be strategically between Washington and Beijing,” he said. “The Indians, however, have a need to align themselves with the Americans to counter the Chinese.”
