(LiveMint)
India’s foreign minister Sushma Swaraj is to have a series of multilateral meetings on Thursday with her counterparts from Brazil and South Africa as well as other BRICS nations and those from South Asia at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The most-watched of these will be Swaraj’s meeting with her counterparts from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) which will include her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi. This comes after India called off talks with Pakistan after agreeing to a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi.
In recent years, Saarc countries have increasingly complained that the reason the grouping has little to show for itself in terms of economic progress and cooperation in regional connectivity is because of hostile relations between India and Pakistan, two of its largest members.
India on 21 September called off the proposed foreign minister-level talks with Pakistan in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assemblyfollowing the abduction and killing of three Jammu and Kashmir police personnel. Any talks with Pakistan will be meaningless as the neighbour would not mend its ways, India had then said. The Indian government cited two “deeply disturbing” events as reasons for cancellation of the talks which included “brutal killings of our security personnel by Pakistan-based entities and the recent release of a series of 20 postage stamps by Pakistan glorifying a terrorist and terrorism”. Some of these stamps show Burhan Wani, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander who was killed by Indian security forces in 2016.
