Sushma Swaraj to travel to Pakistan on December 8

NEW DELHI: Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj will travel to Islamabad on December 8 to attend the Heart of Asia security conference being held there, top government sources here confirmed. She will be accompanied by foreign secretary S Jaishankar.

This will be the first significant engagement between the 2 countries since the meeting between PM Narendra Modi and his counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Ufa in July this year as she is expected to call on Sharif and also his adviser on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz on the sidelines of the conference.

Swaraj will return to India in the evening the next day, making her visit? last not more than 24 hours.

Both these engagements on the sidelines of the Afghanistan conference, according to government sources, will be in the nature of courtesy meetings as Pakistan is the host nation. India will continue? to insist that Pakistan must acknowledge the primacy of the issue of terrorism in bilateral relations.

The government had for a while thought about sending MoS for external affairs V K Singh to Pakistan but after the Modi-Sharif handshake in Paris decided to send Swaraj instead. Swaraj had been invited by Pakistan to attend the conference. Another reason why India found it difficult to ignore the invite was that the same had been extended by Afghanistan too.

Jaishankar, however, is not likely to have a separate meeting with his counterpart Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhary. While India has insisted, in keeping with what was decided in Ufa, that first the NSAs meet to discuss terrorism, Islamabad has maintained that foreign secretaries too meet almost simultaneously to discuss other outstanding issues, most notably the "core issue" of Kashmir.