Opinion Express View on SCO meet: Despite differences

The Delhi summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation showed up in clear relief India’s differences with the grouping. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it plain that India was opposed to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has posed a challenge both to India’s official territorial claims over Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, and Indian influence in the South Asian region. His message was that connectivity projects that violated sovereignty and territorial integrity of a member state could not be an asset for the region. India stayed out of a paragraph in the Delhi Declaration in which other members reaffirmed their support for BRI, and “not[ed] the ongoing work to jointly implement this project, including efforts to link the construction of the Eurasian Economic Union and BRI”. It is unclear from the Delhi Declaration if India is on board the SCO’s effort to promote local currencies for intra-SCO trade. And on terrorism, PM Modi flagged the issue of cross-border terrorism as a policy for “some countries” and demanded that the SCO should criticise such nations without hesitation. The barb was directed at China, as much as Pakistan, for Beijing’s repeated blocking of proposals in the UN Security Council to designate senior members of Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish e Mohammed.

The China-dominated grouping has now set itself the interesting goal of forming a “unified list” of terrorist, separatist and extremist organisations. It is unclear what the objective of such a list can be when the Security Council already has a designation system, and China, as a permanent member of the UNSC, participates in that exercise. Will the SCO list include or exclude those already on that list? Does it mean that SCO members will recognise only this “unified list”? The effort to develop “common principles and approaches” promises to prise open a full can of worms.

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The admission of Iran into the grouping is bound to add to Delhi’s already evident discomfiture in the SCO. Of all the members, India is now the most closely aligned to the US. Russia and China are in a tight embrace, and the Chinese are expanding their footprint in Central Asia, with a thumbs-up for the BRI from all the Central Asian members. India’s relations with China and Pakistan are not about to improve anytime soon. Though India and Iran continue to have substantive and cordial bilateral ties, Teheran has drawn strategically closer to Beijing in recent years, around the same time as India toed the Trump Administration’s re-imposition of sanctions on the country in 2018. While India worked around US sanctions to continue buying Russian crude oil, it did not do this for Iran. For the same reason, the India-Iran Chabahar port project has moved slowly. The SCO presents Delhi with a room full of countries none of which shower the same kind of praise that it has got used to from the US and the West. Yet, this is also what diplomacy is about, to be able to navigate difficult ground, and manage differences. If effective engagement with Central Asia was a principal driver for India’s entry in the SCO, it still remains a compelling enough reason, along with the security situation arising out of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, for India to remain active in the SCO despite the differences.