For the second time in a week, leaders of India and Pakistan will gather at the venue of a multilateral meeting without them being accused of indulging in mutual recriminations or letting their public spat affect the dynamics of summitry.
Earlier this week, commerce minister Anand Sharma had a brief encounter with Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on the margins of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
Come Thursday, it will be the turn of external affairs minister S.M. Krishna to sit around a table with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan. They have been invited to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, to be held in the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent on Thursday and Friday.
Since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, the Indian and Pakistani leaders have only met on the margins of multilateral summits and that too in a third country, starting with the Manmohan Singh-Zardari meeting at Yekaterinburg in June 2009, the Singh-Gilani talks at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh in July 2009, the Krishna-Qureshi meeting at New York in 2009 and the Singh-Gilani meeting at Bhutan in April 2010.
Their last meeting on the sidelines of the Saarc summit in the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu had drawn a candid response from President Mohammed Nasheed of Maldives, who thought India and Pakistan needed to compartmentalise their problems and not allow their differences to overshadow the deliberations.
Mr Krishna, who has been invited by his Pakistan counterpart to visit Islamabad on July 15, is not expected to have a structured interaction with Mr Zardari in Tashkent. At best, they would shake hands briefly, like Mr Sharma and Mr Qureshi did in Istanbul.
A source here said the only bilateral meeting planned so far will be Mr Krishna’s call on President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. The SCO comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. India, Mongolia, Pakistan and Iran have observer status. India became an SCO observer in 2005 along with Pakistan and Iran while Mongolia joined a year earlier in 2004. Sri Lanka and Belarus became SCO dialogue partners in 2009.