India will host the first Civilisational Dialogue Forum of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in New Delhi from November 20 to 22, and has invited Pakistan's Minister for National Heritage and Culture, Aurangzeb Khan Khichi, to attend, in what would be the first visit by a Pakistani minister to India since 2023.
The invitation, reported by The Hindu and confirmed by diplomatic sources quoted in other outlets, marks a significant moment in the fraught relationship between the two neighbours. If Khichi travels to Delhi, it will be the first time India has hosted a minister from Pakistan since the SCO foreign ministers' meeting in Goa in May 2023, when the then Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari visited India.
It would also be the first such ministerial visit since the four-day military conflict between India and Pakistan in May 2025.
The forum will be organised jointly by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of External Affairs, and is expected to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Delhi's Purana Qila, the 16th-century fort built by Emperor Humayun.
Officials explaining the choice of venue have pointed to the site's extraordinary historical depth: excavations at Purana Qila have revealed layers of India's past spanning nearly 3,000 years, from the pre-Mauryan and Mauryan periods through the Sunga, Kushana, Gupta and post-Gupta eras to the medieval Rajput, Sultanate and Mughal periods.
The idea for the dialogue was proposed by Prime Minister Modi at the SCO leaders' summit in Tianjin last year and was subsequently adopted by the SCO Council. Culture ministers from all ten member states of the grouping, including China, Russia, Iran, Belarus and the Central Asian states, have been invited, along with representatives from observer countries and dialogue partners.
The New Indian Express reported that representatives from more than 25 countries are expected to gather at Purana Qila for the three-day event.
Pakistan, however, has not yet confirmed who will lead its delegation to the forum. Diplomatic sources quoted in the reports said Islamabad had not, as of October 27, said whether Khichi himself would attend or whether another official would represent the country.
That uncertainty is itself a measure of how delicate the engagement remains: even an invitation routed through a multilateral forum, rather than a bilateral channel, requires careful political calculation on both sides.
The SCO is a ten-member Eurasian grouping that brings together China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, with a wider circle of observer states and dialogue partners. Founded in 2001, it has grown into one of the largest regional organisations in the world by population and geography, covering security, economic cooperation and cultural exchange.
Its summits and ministerial meetings have, for years, provided one of the few structured settings in which Indian and Pakistani leaders and officials continue to meet, even when bilateral dialogue is frozen.
That pattern has held through the most difficult periods in the relationship. India has continued to participate in SCO engagements involving Pakistan despite suspending its participation in SAARC meetings in Islamabad since 2016.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar travelled to Islamabad in November 2024 to represent India at the SCO heads of government meeting, and in September 2026 India sent its SCO National Coordinator, Alok Dimri, to Islamabad for a coordination meeting linked to Pakistan's presidency of the grouping and preparations for the SCO leaders' summit scheduled to be held in Pakistan in August 2027.
The civilisational dialogue itself is a new format within the SCO, and its theme reflects an argument India has made consistently in multilateral forums: that the region's shared histories, archaeological heritage and cultural traditions are a resource for diplomacy, not merely a subject for academic study.
Holding the first edition at Purana Qila, a site where the material record of successive Indian civilisations lies literally layered in the earth, is intended to make that point physically as well as rhetorically.
For India, the forum also serves a wider diplomatic purpose. As the host, New Delhi sets the agenda and the guest list, and the presence of culture ministers from across Eurasia, from Moscow and Beijing to Tehran and the Central Asian capitals, underlines India's ambition to be a convening power in its extended neighbourhood.
The participation of Pakistan, if it materialises, would add a further dimension, demonstrating that multilateral platforms can still bring the two countries into the same room even when direct talks remain off the table.
The timing is notable. The reports of the invitation came days after sharp exchanges between India and Pakistan at the United Nations, and shortly after a senior Indian official visited Islamabad for an SCO planning meeting. The juxtaposition captures the dual track that has defined the relationship in recent years: public confrontation in global forums, alongside continued, low-key engagement inside regional institutions where both countries hold membership and obligations.
Whether Khichi attends will be watched closely, not only in New Delhi and Islamabad but across the SCO's membership. A Pakistani ministerial presence at Purana Qila in November would not, by itself, transform the bilateral relationship, and neither government has suggested that it would.
But it would break a three-year gap in ministerial visits, and it would do so on a platform that both countries value: a forum devoted to the civilisations that, for all their differences, have shaped the region both nations inhabit.
India has not yet announced its own level of representation at the SCO heads of state summit that Pakistan is due to host next year, and that decision will be a separate test of the same calculation. For now, the November forum stands as the more immediate question. The invitations have gone out, the venue is set, and the inauguration is pencilled in for the Prime Minister.
For Pakistan, the decision is complicated by domestic politics as well as diplomacy. A ministerial visit to Delhi would be presented by supporters as constructive multilateral engagement and by critics as a concession made without any corresponding movement on the issues that matter most to Islamabad.
The fact that the invitation comes from India, as host of a forum both countries belong to, gives Islamabad a degree of political cover: attendance can be framed as participation in the SCO's work rather than as a bilateral gesture. Even so, the absence of a confirmation, days after the invitation became public, suggests that the decision is still being weighed at the highest levels.
The wider SCO calendar adds another layer to the calculation. Pakistan holds the grouping's presidency and is due to host the leaders' summit in August 2027, an event to which Prime Minister Modi has been invited. How India handles the November forum, and how Pakistan responds, will inevitably colour expectations for that summit.
Neither side has linked the two events publicly, but in multilateral diplomacy, attendance patterns are read as signals, and both capitals will be aware that a snub in November would be remembered in August.
What remains is Pakistan's answer, and with it, the first indication of whether a dialogue about civilisations can open even a narrow channel between two countries that have found almost every other door closed.
(Reporting based on The Hindu and The New Indian Express.)