A day after India announced that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will travel to Islamabad to attend a key meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) mid-October, he said he was going to Pakistan for a "multilateral event" and not to discuss Indo-Pak relations.
He said this in response to a query during an interaction after he delivered the Sardar Patel Lecture on Governance organised by IC Centre for Governance here.
"Yes, I am scheduled to go to Pakistan in the middle of this month, and that is for a meeting of the SCO Heads of Government. Normally, prime ministers go to high-level meetings of heads of state, and one of the ministers goes for the heads of government meeting, so it's in line with the tradition," he said.
"It so happens that the meeting is taking place in Pakistan, because like us they are a relatively recent member," Jaishankar said.
Pakistan is hosting the SCO Council of Heads of Government (CHG) meeting on October 15 and 16.
It will be for the first time in nearly nine years that India's external affairs minister will travel to Pakistan even as the ties between the two neighbours remained frosty over the Kashmir issue and cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan.
During the interaction, Jaishankar was asked if he was preparing for his visit to Pakistan for the SCO meeting, and what was his anticipation from it.
"Am I planning for it? Of course, I am planning for it. In my business, you plan for everything which you are going to do, and for a lot of thing that you are not going to do, and which could happen also, you plan for that as well," he said.
"So, I expect there will be a lot of media interest, because of the very nature of the relationship is such... I think, we will deal with it," he added.
The external affairs minister said his visit is for a "multilateral event, I am not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations, I am going there to be a good member of the SCO".
"But, since I am a courteous and civil person, I will behave myself accordingly," he said.
The SCO was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan became its permanent members in 2017.
In July 2023, Iran became the new permanent member of the SCO at an India-hosted virtual summit of the grouping.
In his address, Jaishankar said, "Today the world is again in the midst of a great churn, and that world order that had just emerged in Patel's time, has now run its course."
"We are seeing the emergence of multi-polarity, and the return to the natural diversity of the world," he underlined.
He said there is "no model, no text book that is going to guide us in this era".
"What we need is a right combination of self-belief, realism, preparations, nationalism, the very qualities of Sardar Patel that I spoke about. We need them to prepare for a Viksit Bharat. Sardar Patel will always be an inspiration to that endeavour," Jaishankar said.
