AA Edit | India was forced to talk tough at SCO

The Asian geopolitical landscape has not changed. India has little choice except to live as it must in a state of perpetual hostility with Pakistan and with China — despite trade flowing freely and mostly in favour of China because of the compulsions of the price of goods. It is only a quirk of timing that India should be chairing G-20 for the year even as it hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Council for Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Goa last week.  

India may have been thrust into the role of chairing important diplomatic meetings. But, considering the Pakistani foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s snarky comment on India and Kashmir, it could have done little about the SCO ending as a slanging match with Pakistan. It was not a great idea that the neighbouring country’s foreign minister chose to visit India even if he had to because Pakistan’s benefactor China is the main driver of SCO and the Russian foreign minister’s presence was an additional incentive for Pakistan towards pursuing that newfound friendship. 

The SCO meeting of foreign ministers was hardly a diplomatic success. At best, the meetings of foreign ministers represented an opportunity for India to emphasise its points of view, as it had to with China which keeps harping on normalising relationships before trying to settle the border situation. For India, disengagement to pre-2020 positions was a basic reference point.  

The presence of Russia’s Sergei Lavrov lent the Goa scene an intriguing dimension with the foreign minister also throwing light on an incipient economic problem with the Indian rupee to pay for discounted Russian crude piling up, though his bilateral meeting with Mr S. Jaishankar was unlikely to be helpful in solving this new riddle. India’s foreign minister must have come away with the impression that the bilateral meetings he had with his Chinese and Russian counterparts were more productive than the fuller SCO table. 

A Pakistani foreign minister was visiting India for the first time in 12 years. But, far from helping that to be a new starting point for building a constituency of peace and not let ties remain hostage to history, all that the visit did was stoke a war of words. It began, of course, with Bilawal’s comment, made to Pakistani media representatives and meant for his domestic audience, which was about India hosting the G-20 tourism summit in Srinagar later this month and what Pakistan would really like to do about it.  

The Indian counter to Bilawal’s comment was doubtless a caustic one, but it had to be seen more in the context of a couple of most recent events of terror in the Kashmir Valley, in Poonch and Rajouri, which points to Pakistan upping its old game again. If indeed, a Pakistan hand is seen encouraging the export of terror as in the two attacks, it would be a big change from its much-touted promise of distancing from state sponsorship of terror via which it has managed to extract some concessions regarding staying out of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) lists.  

Far from being a genial host, India may have risked being seen as abrasive. But, as they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same, at least as far as Pakistan and its terrorism playbook and China’s acquisitive eye on territories are concerned.