ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi will attend the Heart of Asia meeting, which will also see the participation of his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar, a media report said on Tuesday. The meeting will take place in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the Dawn news report said.

The development comes a week after Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa asked India "to bury the past and move forward" while saying the military was ready to enter talks to resolve "all our outstanding issues".

The Heart of Asia process provides a platform for regional cooperation with Afghanistan at its centre and with the recognition by the participants that a secure and stable Afghanistan is vital to the prosperity of the region. The process involves 15 participating countries, 17 supporting countries and 12 regional and international organizations.

Bajwa's comments came following Prime Minister Imran Khan call for a resolution on Kashmir, which he described as "the one issue that holds us back". If Qureshi and Jaishankar meet in Dushanbe it would be the first meeting between the two top officials, the Dawn news report said.

In May 2019, Qureshi met the then Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj during an informal interaction in Bishkek on the sidelines of an SCO meeting. According to the report, Pakistani officials have not yet commented on the Qureshi-Jaishankar meeting but did not rule out a possibility. "In view of the events taking place around us, we cannot say it's impossible," the Dawn news report quoted one of the officials as saying.

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