FO confirms PM Sharif, Modi meeting on July 10

Pakistan has been making substantive contribution to regional peace, security and development in its capacity as an observer state of the SCO, a Foreign Office statement said on Monday. The Ufa summit, the group’s seventh formal meeting, is expected to deliver a “roadmap to 2025” to guide the association’s development.

The SCO is expected to give formal go ahead for inducting India and Pakistan as permanent members.

On July 2 the SCO secretariat received Egypt’s application for partnering state status, Kobyakov said.

The summit coincides with a meeting in Ufa of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a security bloc grouping China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which India and Pakistan are set to join.

Putin is expected to meet with the leaders of China and Iran during the event, which runs until Saturday in the Russian city of Ufa, about 1,200 kilometres east of Moscow.

“It is very special to be in Russian Federation, a nation whose remarkable friendship with India has always been known”, Modi said on his arrival.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to convey to Russian President Vladimir Putin New Delhi’s concerns over Moscow’s growing defence ties with Islamabad and its recent decision not to support India’s bid to nail Pakistan on terror financing in a multilateral forum.

“As we’ve always said, China and India are the largest developing countries and emerging markets in the world”.

A top Russian official yesterday said the process of India’s membership will be completed by next year, along with that of Pakistan, to make it an eight-member body.

The hosting of the BRICS summit “emphasised that Russia’s isolation is non-existent as before, despite the claims of some politicians in the United States and the European Union”, political analyst Alexei Mukhin who heads the pro-Kremlin Centre for Political Information, told Kommersant FM radio. “[M]ore than a year after the two countries initiated most of their bilateral projects”, including a much-hyped 0 billion dollar natural gas deal, “there has been no significant progress, and some projects have been abandoned altogether”, he says.

Putin said “combining efforts, no doubt we will overcome all the problems before us”.

The New Development Bank, whose first president is noted Indian banker KV Kamath, yesterday held inaugural meeting of its Board of Governors, in which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also participated.