NEW DELHI: A day after it was officially announced that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will lead a delegation to the Shanghai Corporation Organisation (SCO) Summit scheduled to be held in Islamabad from October 15-16, he said his intention is not to discuss India-Pakistan relations while being in that country.“I am scheduled to go to Pakistan in the middle of this month for the SCO Summit. Normally, the Prime Minister would have gone. I expect there would be a lot of media address because of the very nature of the relation, but we will deal with it. But I do want to say that we are going for a multilateral event. I am not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations. I am going there to be a good member of the SCO, but since I am a civil and courteous person, I will behave myself accordingly,’’ said Jaishankar in Delhi on Saturday at a Sardar Patel memorial lecture.The external affairs minister also said that like with any neighbour, India would certainly like to have good relations with Pakistan. “But that cannot happen by overlooking cross-border terrorism and indulging in wishful thinking. As Sardar Patel demonstrated, realism must be the foundation for policy,” Jaishankar said.India’s relationship with China is similarly an issue on which Sardar Patel’s instincts are on record, and they differed considerably from that of the then prime minister, Jaishankar said, adding that the most cited example of that was their exchange of correspondence in 1950.“In Patel’s view, India had done everything to allay China’s apprehensions, but that country regarded us with suspicion and skepticism, perhaps mixed with a little hostility,” Jaishankar said, highlighting that for the first time, India’s defence had to concentrate on two fronts simultaneously. “Patel’s assessment was that China had definite ambitions and aims that shaped its thinking about India in a less-than-friendly way,” Jaishankar said.Nehru, in contrast, referred to China’s protestations of friendship and warned against losing our sense of perspective and giving way to unreasoning fears, the EAM said. “To him, it was inconceivable that China would undertake, what he called a wild adventure across the Himalayas. He did not, in his words, envisage any real military invasion from China in the foreseeable future,” Jaishankar said.
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