Status quo at SCO

Summit hardly moved the needle on cooperation

India’s presidency of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which concluded with a virtual Heads of State summit on July 4, has yielded mixed results. On the one hand, it took place soon after a notably successful state visit to the US by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that conspicuously strengthened India-US ties. Contextualised within the Quad security grouping, which has the US, Australia, Japan, and India, the tenor and content of the India-US partnership could well be interpreted as an anti-Chinese axis. Together with purchases of Russian crude oil, India’s membership of the eight-member SCO — which entails conducting joint military training exercises — plays a critical role in signalling that the country follows an independent foreign policy equidistant from both powers. The major summit developments in welcoming the Islamic Republic of Iran, still a Western antagonist, as an SCO member-state and a proposal to make Belarus, Russia’s ally in its invasion of Ukraine, a full member by 2024, would have gone some way in underlining this message.

Together with the G20 presidency, the SCO presidency offered India the opportunity to raise its stature as a credible interlocutor in the regional geopolitical discourse. At last year’s summit in Uzbekistan, for instance, Mr Modi’s statesmanlike admonition to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine did much to raise India’s stature within the group — not least because the former oil-rich Soviet “stans”, which are SCO members, fear similar incursions from Moscow and Beijing. In contrast, Tuesday’s virtual summit, in place of the originally planned in-person meet, yielded limited outcomes. Each of the key members appeared to follow a different objective. Though the PM must be commended for candidly speaking of the use of cross-border terrorism as an instrument of state policy and the criticality of respecting the territorial sovereignty of member-countries — direct messages to Pakistan and China, respectively — the comments yielded barbed ripostes, book-ending the contentious foreign ministers’ meet in Goa earlier this year.

Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke of the need for vigilance against external attempts to foment a “new Cold War”; Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said religious minorities should not be “demonised in pursuit of domestic political agendas”. Mr Putin, attending his first international meet after a mutiny by one of his closest aides, thanked the SCO leaders for support and sought greater consolidation against “relevant international issues”. The issue of Afghanistan, the troubled regional elephant in the room, was accorded unexceptional near-unanimity. Beyond that, the SCO summit does not appear to have moved the needle greatly in terms of cooperation. The New Delhi Declaration issued at the end of the leaders’ summit is a near-repeat, with some semantic changes, of the Samarkand declaration of 2022, including India’s refusal to sign on to the paragraph regarding China’s Belt and Road Initiative (on grounds that the route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor violates sovereign Indian territory). Despite official Western assessments dismissing the SCO, it probably holds greater relevance for India than, say, the BRICS. The grouping accounts for 40 per cent of the world’s population and 30 per cent of global output. With Iran, it will control 20 per cent of the world’s oil reserves. In short, the SCO has the potential to create an economically constructive alliance that could balance China’s regional domination. India should capitalise on this opportunity.