Purana Qila in late November is not where most people would expect India-Pakistan diplomacy to restart. The 16th-century fort will host something stranger than a summit and softer than a negotiation: a forum on civilisations, culture and shared heritage. And for the first time since the military confrontation of May 2025, Pakistan has been invited.
India has invited Pakistan’s National Heritage and Culture Minister, Aurangzeb Khan Khichi, to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s first Civilisational Dialogue Forum in New Delhi, sources told The Indian Express on Tuesday. The three-day forum starts on November 20 at Purana Qila, according to The Pioneer, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to inaugurate it. Invitations have gone to all 10 SCO member states, plus observer and dialogue partner countries, taking the expected attendance past 25 countries.
The invitation sets up an India Pakistan SCO meet in Delhi that nobody would have predicted six months ago. Operation Sindoor, India’s strikes on terror infrastructure in May 2025 after the Pahalgam terror attack, froze what little contact remained between the two countries. This is the first invitation to a senior Pakistani minister since then. If Khichi attends, it would be the first visit by a senior Pakistani minister to India since Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, then Pakistan’s foreign minister, travelled to Goa in May 2023 for an SCO foreign ministers’ meeting.
Why this India Pakistan SCO meet is not a thaw
It helps to be precise about what this is, because the headlines will outrun it. This is not a bilateral meeting. It is not a back channel. It is a multilateral obligation, and Delhi has been open about that logic: having proposed to host the forum, India has to invite every SCO member. The Indian Express reports that framing explicitly, and it matters, because it gives both governments cover. Pakistan can attend without calling it engagement. India can host without calling it a thaw.
That is also why the choice of invitee is the most interesting detail in the whole story. Delhi did not invite Pakistan’s foreign minister or its defence establishment. It invited the culture minister, to a forum about heritage, art and literature. Culture is the lowest-stakes door in the building, and the fact that Delhi picked that door first, rather than any other, tells you how carefully this is being staged.
There is a second, quieter reason the timing matters. Pakistan takes over as host of the SCO leaders’ summit next year, having assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Council of Heads of State for 2026-27 on September 1, according to Business Today. An invitation now is also a test of reciprocity later. If Islamabad accepts a seat in Delhi this November, it becomes much harder for it to argue, next year, that India should be kept out of rooms Pakistan hosts.
Two readings, and which one to believe
Read it one way, and this is routine multilateral housekeeping. India proposed the forum, Prime Minister Modi first floated the idea at the SCO leaders’ summit in Tianjin in September 2025, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh formally announced that India would host it at the SCO Council of Heads of Government meeting in Dushanbe on October 20, 2026. Inviting all members follows automatically. Nothing to see.
Read it the other way, and the routine is the point. After a decade in which bilateral ties have stayed frozen since the Pathankot and Uri attacks of 2016, multilateral rooms are the only rooms left where the two countries still sit down together. The Indian Express notes that Delhi has to engage with Pakistan at the multilateral level even while keeping bilateral ties frozen. A culture forum in a Delhi fort is not a breakthrough, but it is a room, and rooms have a habit of mattering later.
The honest answer sits between the two readings. This is not a resumption of dialogue, and anyone selling it as one is getting ahead of the facts. But it is also not nothing, because the alternative to this invitation was a deliberate snub, and Delhi chose not to deliver one. In diplomacy between these two countries, what a government chooses not to do often says as much as what it does.
What to watch before November 20
The first thing is the simplest: does Khichi come? As of Tuesday, Pakistan had not confirmed attendance, Times Now and The Pioneer both reported. A confirmation would make this the first senior Pakistani ministerial visit in more than three years. A quiet decline, or a lower-level replacement, would tell a different story, and arguably a more familiar one.
The second is the language around the visit, if it happens. At Dushanbe, Rajnath Singh paired the forum announcement with a firm line on terrorism, saying there should be no double standards in dealing with the threat and no place for those who finance, support or provide safe havens to terrorists. Expect that line to travel to Delhi in November. The forum’s subject is civilisation, but the subtext, as ever, will be security.
The third is what happens after. Pakistan hosting the SCO leaders’ summit next year means this invitation will be answered in kind, or not, within months. That is the real timeline here, not the three days in November.
It has been a crowded week in Delhi: on the same day this invitation surfaced, the Cabinet cleared a 3% DA hike for central government employees. But the SCO invitation is the decision that will still be quoted in a year. Earlier this month, Delhi took a notably sharper tone toward Pakistan in its rejection of the OIC’s anti-India resolutions. Now it has invited a Pakistani minister to Delhi. Both moves can be true at once. That contradiction is not confusion. It is the policy: firm where Delhi says the stakes are real, correct where protocol requires it, and willing to leave a door open that costs nothing to leave open.
So the question for November 20 is not whether India and Pakistan are talking again. They are not, not bilaterally. The question is whether a room full of culture ministers in a 500-year-old fort turns out to be the place where the freeze starts, very slowly, to crack. We will know by who shows up.