On Thursday, Pakistan announced that Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari would attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in India next month. It was announced at a weekly media briefing by Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch. She stated that Pakistan’s foreign minister would attend the meeting because External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had invited him. It would be Pakistan’s highest-level visit to India in recent years, and an opportunity to break the ice between the two countries. After India’s warplanes bombed a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack, relations between India and Pakistan deteriorated significantly. Relations deteriorated further in August 2019, when India announced the withdrawal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special powers and the division of the former state into Union territories. The SCO was established in 2001 at a summit in Shanghai by the presidents of Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It has grown to become one of the largest trans-regional international organizations. In 2017, India and Pakistan were admitted as permanent members of the Beijing-based SCO.
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