'Era of uninterrupted dialogue with Pakistan is over': Jaishankar amid India confirming invite for SCO meet

Pakistan holds the rotating chairmanship of the SCO Council of Heads of Government (CHG) and in that capacity, will be hosting the two-day in-person SCO Heads of Government meeting in October.

New Delhi: The days of New Delhi continuing to hold talks with Islamabad despite the export of terror from across the border are over, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday, even as India refrained from committing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Pakistan to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s meeting.

“I think the era of uninterrupted dialogue with Pakistan is over. Actions have consequences,” Jaishankar said at Vivekananda International Foundation in New Delhi.

His comment came on a day New Delhi confirmed that Islamabad had sent an invitation to Modi to attend the annual conclave of the SCO Heads of Government Council which would be hosted by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in his country’s capital on October 15 and 16.

“Yes, India has received the invitation for attending the Heads of Government Summit of SCO hosted by Pakistan. As and when we have an update, we will share it with you,” Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, told journalists in New Delhi on Friday.

Shehbaz’s brother and then Pakistani Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif had sent an invitation to Modi to attend the SAARC summit in Islamabad in November 2016. But in the wake of a series of attacks carried out in India by terrorist organisations based in Pakistan between January and September 2016, followed by India’s surgical strike on terrorist facilities across its LoC with Pakistan, Modi opted out of the SAARC summit. The other South Asian leaders also decided to skip the conclave, which was then indefinitely postponed. Sources in New Delhi told DH that Modi would also turn down Shahbaz’s invitation given the current state of India-Pakistan relations.

“The issue today is what kind of relationship we (India) can possibly contemplate with Pakistan,” Jaishankar said after launching former diplomat Rajiv Sikri’s new book “Strategic Conundrums: Reshaping India’s Foreign Policy”. “What I do want to say is that we are not passive, and whether events take a positive or negative direction, either way we will react,” he added.

The erstwhile United Progressive Alliance government in New Delhi had suspended the formal dialogue with Islamabad after 10 Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists sailed from Pakistan to India in November 2008 and carried out the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai. The talks had resumed in February 2011 but were suspended again in January 2013 after the Pakistan Army personnel brutally killed two Indian Army soldiers on the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

A few days before Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore to attend the wedding ceremony of Sharif’s granddaughter, the Modi Government had on December 9, 2015, agreed to resume the stalled India-Pakistan dialogue. But the series of terror attacks in India in 2016 by outfits based in Pakistan prompted New Delhi to keep the talks with Islamabad suspended.