India's top diplomat travelling to Pakistan for SCO summit later this month

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will visit Pakistan to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit this month, the Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson has said.

Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on Friday that Jaishankar will lead the Indian delegation to Pakistan for the summit of Eurasian leaders on Oct. 15 and 16 but did not say if he would meet any Pakistani leaders on the sidelines.

The visit will be the first by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistan in nearly a decade and will take place at a time when relations between the two states have been strained over the Kashmir dispute.

The South Asian neighbours have fought three wars, including two over control of the disputed Kashmir region in the Himalayas.

Relations between the two countries have gone through periods of thaw from time to time but have been largely frozen as they downgraded diplomatic ties in tit-for-tat moves in 2019 after New Delhi scrapped Kashmir's special autonomy and split it into two federally administered territories.

Ties had deteriorated earlier in 2019 after a suicide bombing of an Indian military convoy in the India-administered Kashmir was traced to Pakistan-based group, prompting India to carry out an air strike on what it claimed was a militant base in Pakistan.

The last high-level visit between the two countries took place in May 2023 when Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Pakistan's foreign minister at the time, attended the SCO foreign ministers' meeting in India's coastal state of Goa.