Takeaways from SCO meet

LAST week, India chaired a conclave of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers for the first time. As was the case with SAARC meetings earlier, the India-Pakistan sideshow stole the limelight. A close second was the frosty bilateral meeting between Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang where no breakthrough was achieved on the border stalemate. A closer examination will show that the SCO is riddled with bilateral differences. Tajikistan had blocked Iran’s membership for years because of its backing for an Islamist party in Dushanbe. There is a perennial water dispute between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, an inter-ethnic conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and frequent diplomatic sabre-rattling between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Unlike India and Pakistan, they at least don’t allow these differences to vitiate SCO meetings.

However, despite the presence of China and Pakistan, India still believes that its membership of SCO fully serves its interests. Jaishankar sees bilateral differences among SCO members as a characteristic of foreign policy in today’s fluid multipolar world. Besides some military exercises, it is still a diplomatic talk shop. At the same time, it could emerge as a major Eurasian grouping as all countries in the region are hedging their bets between the West on the one side and India-China-Russia on the other. The SCO is also attractive because of its promise of modernisation in areas involving their core interests.

India wants the inclusion of English as an official language besides Russian and Chinese to help disseminate SCO’s views to a wider audience. It will also be a symbolic move to show that Russia and China are not the only poles of the SCO. India is an active member that is spearheading new verticals such as startups and innovation, traditional medicine and the revival of Buddhist heritage. Deliberations are also on to create a corpus to get many of the initiatives off the ground. This diversification should help dispel the impression that the SCO is an anti-West grouping. The July summit in Delhi will show whether the SCO can maintain the momentum of the interaction in Goa.