By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif left for Kyrgyzstan on Monday for a three-day visit that will place him at the same summit table as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the first time since the two nuclear-armed neighbours fought a brief conflict last year, part of a gathering of regional leaders marking a quarter-century of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Sharif’s delegation includes Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, Commerce Minister Jam Kamal Khan, Communications Minister Abdul Aleem Khan and Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, according to a statement from Pakistan’s Foreign Office. The prime minister travelled at the invitation of Kyrgyz President Sadyr Zhaparov.
The visit’s centerpiece is Tuesday’s Council of Heads of State meeting in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, where leaders’ events run from Aug. 30 to Sept. 1, with the Council of Heads of State plenary session scheduled for Sept. 1. The gathering will be held under the chairmanship of Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, whose government currently holds the organization’s rotating leadership.
At the close of the summit, Pakistan is set to take over that chairmanship for the coming year — a responsibility that will fall directly to Sharif and his government as they prepare to host the bloc’s heads-of-state summit in Islamabad in 2027.
The Bishkek summit will draw a dense roster of regional power brokers. Also expected are Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, alongside Modi.
The Modi-Sharif overlap carries particular weight. Tensions between Pakistan and India persist primarily over Kashmir, and the two countries will be sharing the same forum more than a year after a brief conflict between them. Pakistani officials have given no indication that a formal bilateral meeting between the two leaders is planned on the sidelines.
Beyond the two South Asian rivals, the summit arrives at a moment of shifting alignments across the bloc. The meeting follows a tentative improvement in China-India relations after years of tension over their disputed border, while Pezeshkian’s participation comes as the United States threatens increased secondary sanctions against countries and entities that continue doing business with Iran. SCO leaders are expected to take up major regional and international security challenges, including the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, the situation in Afghanistan, and India’s relations with both China and Pakistan.
Sharif’s itinerary opened Monday with the opening ceremony of the World Nomad Games, according to the Foreign Office statement. He is scheduled to take part in the SCO proceedings themselves over the following two days before shifting, on Sept. 2, into a separate track of bilateral diplomacy with his Kyrgyz hosts.
That final day is set aside for one-on-one talks with Zhaparov covering what the Foreign Office described as the full range of the Pakistan-Kyrgyzstan relationship. The two governments are expected to review cooperation in trade and investment, energy, regional connectivity, education, tourism and people-to-people exchanges, along with an exchange of views on broader regional and international developments.
The Foreign Office cast the relationship in warm terms, describing it as rooted in shared history and cultural affinity, and said the visit would build on recent high-level exchanges between the two countries.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was founded in 2001 as an outgrowth of an earlier five-nation security grouping dating to 1996. It now comprises 10 full members — China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran and Belarus — along with observer states Afghanistan and Mongolia. Pakistan and India joined as full members in 2017. Together, the bloc’s members account for roughly half the world’s population and about a quarter of global economic output, and its stated mission centers on regional security cooperation, counterterrorism and expanding trade and infrastructure links across Central and South Asia.
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