India has invited all ten members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, including Pakistan, to the group’s first Civilisational Dialogue Forum in New Delhi from November 20 to 22. Pakistan’s invitee is its Minister for National Heritage and Culture, Aurangzeb Khan Khichi. Should he attend, he would be the first senior Pakistani minister to visit India since Bilawal Bhutto Zardari came to the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting in Goa in May 2023.
The timing gives the invitation its weight. Relations have been severely strained since the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 and the military confrontation that followed in May, known in India as Operation Sindoor. India blamed Pakistan for the attack, and Pakistan denied the accusation. Reports on the forum add that no bilateral meeting between Indian and Pakistani leaders has been announced, and whether Khichi travels is for Islamabad to decide.
India has already been in Pakistan’s room
The Delhi invitation follows a visit in the opposite direction. From September 28 to 30, an Indian delegation led by Alok Dimri, India’s SCO National Coordinator and a senior Ministry of External Affairs official, was in Islamabad for a three-day meeting of the SCO Council of National Coordinators. It was the first such gathering under Pakistan’s chairmanship of the Council of Heads of State for 2026-27. Pakistan took over the chair from Kyrgyzstan on September 1. National coordinators are the diplomats who prepare the ground for summits and ministerial meetings, so the session set the working calendar for Pakistan’s year at the helm.
India’s participation was notable because it came after nearly two years without Indian participation in such a meeting in Pakistan. The last major Indian visit was External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s trip to Islamabad in October 2024 for a heads-of-government meeting, the first by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistan in almost nine years. The September meeting came only days after the two countries exchanged sharp words at the UN General Assembly, which made the atmosphere around it more striking.
The mood on the sidelines was courteous. After the meeting concluded, the coordinators called on Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, and Pakistani media reported that Dimri warmly greeted Dar, then stood beside him for photographs. Dimri also spoke to Pakistan’s state broadcaster, saying he was happy to be in Islamabad and would like to see Lahore, and he stressed connectivity, trade and transit as areas of cooperation under Pakistan’s presidency. Pakistan’s Foreign Office described those remarks as a welcome move, and said it hoped Indian participation would continue.
Dimri used the same platform to promote the Delhi event. Speaking from Islamabad, he announced that the first SCO Civilisation Dialogue Forum, which Prime Minister Modi had proposed, would be held in New Delhi on November 20. The invitation to Khichi is therefore a direct sequel to the exchange of visits, with the Delhi forum timed as India’s turn to host.
What binds India
The obligation here comes from the way the SCO works, not from a bilateral agreement. A country hosting an SCO event is expected to invite every member, regardless of its quarrels with any of them. India has said as much before. In 2020, when it was preparing to host a heads-of-government meeting, the foreign ministry’s spokesperson explained that established SCO practice and procedure meant all members, observers and dialogue partners would be invited. Pakistan describes its own duties the same way. Its foreign office has said that, as host of the 2027 summit, it is obliged to invite all member states.
Public accounts from both capitals treat this as protocol and long-standing practice rather than a specific clause in a treaty, and the distinction matters. A host cannot leave a member off the list without breaking the organisation’s norms and damaging its own standing. A guest, however, remains free to decline. When India invited Pakistan’s foreign minister to Goa in 2023, one Indian scholar noted that hosts are obliged to invite all members and that there was no way India would skip Pakistan because of differences. Pakistan then weighed whether to come, and eventually sent Bhutto Zardari.
India’s own bilateral stance is a different matter, and it is a policy choice rather than a constraint imposed by the SCO. New Delhi holds that talks with Islamabad require an environment free of terrorism. In 2024 the external affairs minister put it bluntly, saying that the era of uninterrupted dialogue with Pakistan is over. The two positions coexist without contradiction. India can extend a courtesy that the SCO’s rules require, and send a coordinator to a working meeting, while keeping its bilateral freeze intact. That is the distinction Indian policy has tried to maintain: engaging with Pakistan when the SCO requires it, without treating that as a reopening of the bilateral relationship.
What kind of forum this is
The Civilisational Dialogue Forum is a cultural gathering, not a security meeting or a foreign ministers’ session. Pakistan’s invitee is a heritage minister rather than a diplomat or a defence official, and the setting is about shared history and ideas rather than disputes. That lowers the political cost for both governments. A visit could take place without anyone having to negotiate anything, and without the optics of a formal bilateral encounter.
It also limits what the invitation can signal. Pakistan has made the same point about invitations it sends to India, saying they are routine obligations under multilateral rules and no sign of a change in bilateral relations. Observers will watch whether Khichi accepts, how large his delegation is, and whether any informal contact occurs on the sidelines. Even if all of that happens, it would show that the two countries can occupy the same room, as they did in Islamabad, not that they are ready to talk.
Why the SCO is worth India’s time
India joined the SCO as a full member in 2017, alongside Pakistan, and has stayed deeply involved since. Modi has attended six of the seven in-person summits held since then. The reasons for that commitment run along several lines.
The first is counter-terrorism. The SCO maintains a standing security body, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, headquartered in Tashkent, which coordinates intelligence sharing and joint exercises. At the Tianjin summit in September 2025, member states strongly condemned the Pahalgam attack and agreed that double standards in fighting terrorism are unacceptable, language that tracked India’s long-standing position. The same declaration also denounced attacks in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, including the Jaffar Express hijacking, which kept the text even-handed enough for every member to sign. The outcome followed an earlier episode in which India had refused to sign a joint declaration at Qingdao because it omitted Pahalgam, showing that India treats the forum as a place to press its case and will withhold consent when the text falls short.
The second is access. The SCO places India at the same table as China, Russia and the Central Asian states, on questions of connectivity, energy and regional security. Few other groupings bring those partners together with India as a full participant, and absence would leave the agenda to others.
The third is institutional. India’s strategists often cite the fate of SAARC, the South Asian grouping that was largely paralysed by India-Pakistan hostility. By one assessment, India does not want the SCO to follow the same path, and engaging with the organisation while holding firm on bilateral terms is how it hopes to avoid that.
The limits of the platform
The SCO has never resolved the India-Pakistan quarrel and was not built to do so. Tensions surface regularly. At a virtual SCO meeting in 2020, India’s national security adviser staged a symbolic walkout after the Pakistani representative displayed a map India considers wrong. Pakistan, for its part, continues to say that Kashmir must be addressed for any progress to occur, and it rejects India’s account of Pahalgam. A friendly handshake in Islamabad changes none of that.
The larger test in 2027
The harder question lies ahead. Pakistan holds the SCO chair for 2026-27 and will host the Council of Heads of State summit in Islamabad in August 2027. Its foreign office has said that all heads of state and government will be invited, which means Modi will receive a formal invitation. Asked how Pakistan’s chairship would affect Indian participation, India’s foreign ministry said only that it deals with the SCO as an entity and as an important organisation. Some reports following the coordinators’ meeting added that India has not ruled out Modi attending future high-level SCO meetings in Pakistan, though no decision has been announced.
Whether that principle survives a trip to Islamabad by a prime minister is the real measure of India’s approach. Dimri’s visit shows that working-level engagement is already possible, and the Delhi forum is a modest event with modest stakes. Together they show that two adversaries can share a multilateral space under agreed procedures. They leave open whether the two can ever move from sharing a room to sharing a conversation.
