The rumoured meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his Pakistan counterpart Imran Khan at the upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit was ruled out on June 6.
Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar confirmed that no bilateral talks will take place. "To the best of my knowledge no meeting has been planned between PM Modi and PM Imran Khan at the SCO Summit in Bishkek," he told reporters.
The summit scheduled on June 13-14 in Kyrgyzstan's capital city Bishkek is a political, economic, and security alliance founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001. In 2017, India was granted the membership along with Pakistan.
It was anticipated to be the first bilateral talks since the 2016 terror attack on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot.
While Imran Khan had stated that PM Modi and the BJP will be "good for India-Pakistan relation" before the 2019 Loka Sabha elections, the Indian Prime Minister had maintained its distance as it used the Pakistan-sponsored terror attack and the Balakot airstrikes in his election campaign.
Regarding the future of Indo-Pal relations after maintaining its position of "terror and talks can't go hand in hand" by the ministry, Kumar said that no talks have been planned in the future.
India's relation with Pakistan escalated this year after 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed by a Jaish-e-Muhammad militant in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. Following the incident, Indian Air Force aircraft crossed the LOC and dropped bombs in the vicinity of the town of Balakot in Kyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan. The Pakistan Air Force struck back causing an Indian warplane to be shot down and taking an IAF pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman to be taken as prisoner by the Pakistan military before being returned on March 1.
