“Think he’ll hold talks on how to bring peace between two countries”: Farooq Abdullah on Jaishankar’s participation in SCO meeting

Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], October 5 (ANI): National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah on Saturday expressed happiness over External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s visit to Pakistan for an SCO meeting and said that he thinks the EAM will hold talks on how to bring peace between these two countries – through friendship and not hatred.

“It’s a good thing. The PM attends these meetings, I am happy that S Jaishankar is going, Pakistan has invited him. I think he will hold talks beyond SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) on how to bring peace between these two countries – through friendship and not hatred,” the National Conference leader said.

Abdullah further criticised the Israel attacks and said that if we want to save the world, war is not the solution.

“The situation which is there in West Asia – the way Israel is bombing Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Palestine. If we want to save the world, war is not the solution -it kills innocent. It’s a big thing that we get success through dialogue, I hope Pakistan will also talk about moving ahead,” he said.

The war in West Asia escalated after Iran launched approximately 200 ballistic missiles at targets in Israel on October 1 in response to Israel’s killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut last week and following the July 31 assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Al Jazeera reported. The salvo of 180 projectiles caused no casualties as most missiles were intercepted, according to Israeli army reports. Iran claimed it was targeting three military bases in the Tel Aviv area.

National Conference provincial president, Rattan Lal Gupta, said that his party welcomes government’s decision to participate in SCO meeting. He said that NC has always called for maintaining good relations with neighbours.

He said, “We welcome this. I think this is a very good time because the National Conference has always said that we should have good relations with our neighbours, especially with Pakistan and that we should have dialogues with them. So, now that the Foreign Minister of India is going to Pakistan, we welcome it and I hope new avenues for dialogue will open up. Like how former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee said we can change friends but not neighbours. We believe that if we have good relations with our neighbours, they will progress and we will also progress.”

However, the External Affairs Minister clarified that he is going to Pakistan with only the SCO in mind.

“I expect that there would be a lot of media interest because the very nature of the relationship is such and I think we will deal with it. But I do want to say it will be there for a multilateral event, I mean I am not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations. I am going there to be a good member of the SCO. Since I am a courteous and civil person, I will behave myself accordingly,” he said.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a permanent intergovernmental international organization established on June 15, 2001, in Shanghai by Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Its predecessor was the mechanism of the Shanghai Five.

Currently, the SCO countries include nine Member States — India, Iran, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The SCO has three Observer States – Afghanistan, Mongolia and Belarus.

At the Samarkand SCO Summit in 2022, the process of raising the status of Belarus within the Organization to the level of a member state started. The SCO has 14 Dialogue Partners – Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bahrain, Egypt, Cambodia, Qatar, Kuwait, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Sri Lanka.

Pakistan, which holds the rotating chairmanship of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), is scheduled to host the SCO Council of Heads of Government (CHG) in in Islamabad for October this year, Geo News reported.

Earlier in August, India received an invitation from Pakistan for the SCO Council of Heads of Government (CHG) in-person meeting. While addressing a briefing in August, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, confirmed the invitation by Islamabad for the SCO meeting.