BISHKEK: Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj held an informal dialogue on the sideline of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on Wednesday.

” [I] met Sushma Ji. She had a complaint that we sometimes talk in a bitter manner. She brought sweets so we could also speak sweetly,” Qureshi was quoted as saying by the Foreign Office.

“We made it clear to her that we want all the matters resolved through dialogue, and that Prime Minister Imran Khan had said in his very first speech that if India takes one step forward, we would take two steps forward.”

“Even today we are ready for a dialogue,” he added. The two foreign ministers’ interaction came at the end of a two-day SCO Council of Foreign Ministers’ meeting. They were initially scheduled to meet on the sideline of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York last September.

However, New Delhi had scrapped that meeting just a day after agreeing to it, and had cited “unclean intentions” on Pakistan’s side as the reason for doing so. Monitoring Desk