“Long Live Pakistan” is written on a poster of Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani that is affixed to the wall at the Wagah border. Approximately 400 kilometres from Islamabad, where the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Council of Heads of Government is gathering, Pakistan Rangers defend the gates at the “zero point” on the India-Pakistan border.
The evening in Islamabad is illuminated by LED lights welcome Chinese Premier Li Qiang, while the roads are decorated with the Chinese and Pakistani flags. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif welcomed Li, the country’s first Chinese premier to visit in eleven years, at the airport on Monday. Additionally, the SCO international media centre is situated in the capital’s centrepiece China-Pakistan project, the “China-Pakistan friendship centre,” which Beijing constructed as a component of the Belt and Road Initiative, the pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The media centre at the “China-Pakistan friendship centre,” the warm welcome given to the visiting Chinese Premier, and Geelani’s poster at the India-Pakistan border, where he shares space with the nation’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, all clearly convey the goals and objectives of the Pakistani government.
In light of this, S Jaishankar, the first Indian External Affairs Minister to visit Pakistan in nine years, arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon for the SCO conference. Sushma Swaraj made the most recent such journey on December 8–9, 2015, when she flew to Islamabad to attend the “Heart of Asia” conference on Afghanistan. Swaraj’s entourage included Jaishankar, who was India’s foreign secretary at the time.
Ilyas Nizami, a senior official in the Pakistani foreign ministry and a former political adviser at the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi, welcomed Jaishankar on Tuesday. Video footage of the event showed Jaishankar and Pakistan PM Sharif shaking hands and speaking briefly during a banquet held for the visiting dignitaries in the evening. On Wednesday, Jaishankar will take part in the sessions.
Here in Islamabad, there’s a sense of anticipation about whether his arrival would signal the start of something new, mending the rift between the two nations caused by the terror attacks and the lifting of Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir.
Earlier this month, Jaishankar had kept a window open, as he said he was “planning” for his visit to Pakistan. “In my business, you plan for everything that you are going to do, and for a lot of things that you are not going to do, and which could happen also, you plan for that as well,” he had said.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said: “He is a guest of Pakistan. Pakistan has welcomed all leaders who have decided to come to attend this conference, and Pakistan will demonstrate its traditional hospitality to all guests, including the Minister for External Affairs of India.”
Asked if there was a window of opportunity for a bilateral conversation on the sidelines, she said, “There are no such plans.” She said that Islamabad, as the host of the SCO meeting, would work towards finding solutions to global challenges. “Pakistan is currently the chair of the heads of government of SCO, and has a charter according to which the heads of government focus on economic, trade, cultural connectivity and climate change matters, and this would be the agenda of tomorrow’s conference for which our national coordinators have been meeting and trying to find consensus over a declaration which will be adopted tomorrow,” she said.
During an interaction with Indian journalists, when Pakistan’s Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal was asked whether Pakistan is going to propose a meeting between Jaishankar and Pakistan’s leaders, he said, “We are the hosts, we cannot propose a meeting.” “When it comes to pointing fingers, both countries have enough ammunition to point fingers at each other, and therefore, I think we need to move beyond pointing fingers, and we need to think in terms of the more than one-and-a-half billion people who live in this region… SAARC is dysfunctional. The European Union is not dysfunctional. GCC is not dysfunctional. ASEAN is not dysfunctional. SAARC just happens to be dysfunctional and I always say to my Indian friends, if India only had one fourth the heart of its geography, there would be no problem.”
In the meanwhile, the PTI, the party of imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan, is protesting, and the Pakistani establishment is not playing around. An aura of might permeates Islamabad on this eve of the SCO meeting. Every market and office has closed, and the streets are crowded with security guards. Islamabad will observe a three-day public holiday, according to the administration.
The Parliament, a diplomatic enclave, and the location of most meetings are all included in the “Red Zone” of the city that is guarded by Pakistan Army personnel, according to the interior ministry.
The almost 400-km motorway connecting Lahore to Islamabad has been sanitised, following likely protests by PTI supporters. After Khan called for a protest on October 15, violent clashes between his party supporters and the security personnel have put Pakistan on edge.
