NEW DEHLI Oct 15 — India’s foreign minister flies to Pakistan for a summit today the first visit by New Delhi’s top envoy to its arch-rival neighbour in nearly a decade.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will travel to Islamabad for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit to "represent India at the meeting”, the foreign ministry said Tuesday.

Both sides have said no bilateral talks are planned, and Jaishankar’s visit would strictly follow the SCO schedule.

The two nuclear-armed nations are bitter adversaries, having fought multiple wars since being carved out of the subcontinent’s partition in 1947 following British colonial rule.

The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus—with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or "dialogue partners”.

The SCO is sometimes touted as an alternative to the Western-dominated NATO military alliance.

"India remains actively engaged in the SCO format,” India’s foreign ministry said.

While the SCO has a mandate to discuss security, the Islamabad summit is due to focus on trade, humanitarian and cultural issues.

The last time an Indian foreign minister visited Pakistan was in 2015 when Sushma Swaraj attended a conference on Afghanistan.

The same year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a surprise visit to Lahore to meet his then-counterpart Nawaz Sharif, sparking hopes of a thaw in relations with Pakistan.

But relations plummeted in 2019 when Modi’s government revoked the limited autonomy of Indian-administered Kashmir—which led Pakistan to suspend bilateral trade and downgrade diplomatic ties with New Delhi.

The Himalayan region, home to a long-running and deadly insurgency against Indian rule, is divided between the two countries and claimed by both in full.

Pakistan’s former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was in India’s Goa in 2023 — also a rare visit—for an SCO meeting where he and Jaishankar were involved in a verbal spat.

The two did not hold a one-on-one meeting. — AFP