New Delhi :External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who is scheduled to visit Pakistan later this month for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, said on Saturday that his visit to the neighbouring country is for a multilateral event, not for discussions on India-Pakistan relations.
"It (visit) will be for a multilateral event. I'm not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations. I'm going there to be a good member of the SCO. But, you know, since I'm a courteous and civil person, I will behave myself accordingly,” the Union Minister said.
Jaishankar noted that typically the Prime Minister attends such high-level meetings with heads of state, but "it changes" sometimes.
“So your question, I think, is, what am I planning for it? Of course, I'm planning to go... In my business, you plan for everything which you're going to do, and for a lot of things which you're not going to do and which could also happen. I mean, you plan for that as well,” he said.
Pakistan is hosting the SCO summit in Islamabad on October 15-16. India confirmed on August 30 that it had received an invitation from Pakistan for the upcoming summit.
Jaishankar’s trip to Islamabad will mark the first visit by a high-ranking Indian minister to the country in nearly a decade. The last external affairs minister to visit Pakistan was Sushma Swaraj, who travelled to Islamabad in December 2015 to attend a conference on Afghanistan.
The SCO was founded as a political union of Central Asian nations--Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan--to discuss security and economic matters. India and Pakistan became permanent members in 2017.