India Invites Foreign Ministers of Pakistan and China to May SCO Meeting: Reports
© Sputnik / SERGEI GUNEYEV(L-R) Mongolian President Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, Turkmen President Serdar Berdymukhamedov, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev pose for a family photo before the meeting in an expanded format at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) leaders' summit in Samarkand on September 16, 2022.
© Sputnik / SERGEI GUNEYEV
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MOSCOW (Sputnik) - India has extended invitations to all members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), including Pakistan and China, for the forthcoming meeting of SCO foreign ministers in Goa on May 4-5, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing sources.
India took on the 2022 chairmanship in the SCO in September and will hold key minister-level meetings and a summit this year.
"So far there is no confirmation from the Pakistani side whether foreign minister Bilawal [Bhutto] will attend the meeting or not," one source was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times.
The SCO is an international organization founded by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia and Uzbekistan in 2001. In 2017, India and Pakistan were admitted to the organization.
India and China have thousands of square miles of disputed borderlands between them, from the Ladakh region, which is triangulated with Pakistan's Kashmir claims, all the way to Arunachal Pradesh to the east of Bhutan. Border conflicts are a permanent fixture of India-China relations, as the countries do not have a marked border but rather the Line of Actual Control, created after the 1962 border war between the nations.
India and Pakistan have fought several wars over Kashmir since gaining independence in 1947. However, their ties hit rock bottom in 2019 after the Indian government stripped the Jammu and Kashmir state of its special status and broke it up into two union territories.
India controls the southern part of the Kashmir region, while Pakistan and China hold its northwestern and northeastern parts, respectively.