India foreign minister’s Pakistan visit a ‘good beginning’, Nawaz Sharif says

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was quoted as saying in Indian media on Friday ( 18 October ) that the Indian foreign minister’s visit to Pakistan earlier this week was a” good beginning” that could cause the two rival countries to thaw.

With the capital city in a tight-loop condition, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was meeting with Pakistan’s administrations on Tuesday and Wednesday for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meet.

” This is how conversations move ahead. Talks should not stop”, Sharif, the president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League- Nawaz ( PML-N), and the brother of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, told a group of visiting Indian journalists, the Indian Express newspaper reported.

Nearly a decade after an American foreign minister visited amid icy relations between the two nuclear powers, Jaishankar was one of the almost a hundred leaders who attended the meeting in Islamabad.

According to an official in the Bangladeshi foreign ministry, Jaishankar and his rival Ishaq Dar had an “informal interaction,” but New Delhi denied that any sort of gathering had taken area.

We had made it very clear that this special visit was intended for a gathering of the SCO head of government. Other than that, there were some compliments exchanged on the outside of the meeting, according to American foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal on Thursday.

” We have lost the last 75 years and it is important we do n’t lose the next 75 years”, Sharif was quoted as saying in the Times of India newspaper.