New Delhi
9 June 2010
For the second time in a week, leaders of India and Pakistan will gather at the
venue of a multilateral meeting without them being accused of indulging in mutual
recriminations or letting their public spat affect the dynamics of summitry.
Earlier this week, Commerce minister Anand Sharma had a brief encounter with Pakistan
foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on the margins of the Conference on Interaction
and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
Come Thursday, it will be the turn of External affairs minister SM Krishna to sit around a
table with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan. They have been invited to participate in
the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, to be held in the Uzbekistan
capital of Tashkent on Thursday and Friday.
Since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, the Indian and Pakistani
leaders have only met on the margins of multilateral summits and that too in a third
country, starting with the Manmohan Singh-Zardari meeting at Yekaterinburg in June
2009, the Singh-Gilani talks at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh in July
2009, the Krishna-Qureshi meeting at New York in 2009 and the Singh-Gilani meeting at
Bhutan in April 2010.
Their last meeting on the sidelines of the Saarc summit in the Bhutanese capital of
Thimphu had drawn a candid response from President Mohammed Nasheed of Maldives,
who thought India and Pakistan needed to compartmentalise their problems and not
allow their differences to overshadow the deliberations.
Mr Krishna, who has been invited by his Pakistan counterpart to visit Islamabad on July
15, is not expected to have a structured interaction with Mr Zardari in Tashkent. At best,
they would shake hands briefly, like Mr Sharma and Mr Qureshi did in Istanbul.
A source here said the only bilateral meeting planned so far will be Mr Krishna's call on
President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.
The SCO comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
India, Mongolia, Pakistan and Iran have observer status. India became an SCO observer
in 2005 along with Pakistan and Iran while Mongolia joined a year earlier in 2004. Sri
Lanka and Belarus became SCO dialogue partners in 2009. Afghanistan and
Turkmenistan participate in the SCO summits as special invitees.
At the SCO summit held at Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, in 2008, its members had
agreed to explore the possibility of raising the level of involvement of the observer
countries by making them full-fledged members.
India says it is ready to step up its participation in the SCO. It welcomes greater
connectivity and people-to-people contacts, exchange of businesspersons and scholars,
and trade, investment and technology flows, between and among the SCO members.
India is keen on further enhancing counter-terrorism cooperation, too.
Mr Krishna leaves Thursday for Tashkent. Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao will
accompany the minister. Mr Krishna last visited Uzbekistan in October 2009. Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh visited that country in April 2006. A festival of India in
Uzbekistan is planned.
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