Modi turns down Pakistan invite to SAARC summit

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has turned down Pakistan's invite to the SAARC summit which is to be held in Islamabad. 

The announcement was made by India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. 

"We are not responding to it (Pakistan's invitation to Modi to the SAARC summit) positively because as I said unless and until Pakistan stops terror activities in India, there will be no dialogue. So we will not participate in SAARC," ANI quoted Swaraj as saying. 

Swaraj had earlier said that India and Pakistan were not going to start talking just becuase they are in the process of opening the Kartarpur Corridor. 

The foundation stone-laying ceremony fo the corridor is taking place today in Kartarpur, Pakistan. 

Terror and talks cannot go together, Swaraj said. 

Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal had on Tuesday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be invited for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit. 

Addressing a press conference in Islamabad, Faisal recalled that Prime Minister Imran Khan had said in his victory speech that if India takes one step forward, Pakistan would take two.

The 2016 SAARC summit was also supposed to have been held in Islamabad. 

But after a deadly terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in September that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances".

The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the Islamabad meet. Maldives and Sri Lanka are the seventh and eighth members of the initiative. 

(With inputs from PTI)