There is delicious irony in India’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit held in Astana, Kazakhstan, recently for the first time as a full member. It came at Moscow’s initiative, but China made sure that its “all-weather friend” Pakistan was given similar status. China now assumes the presidency of the SCO for its next summit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his points against the evils of terrorism and extremism, but the SCO was founded 15 years ago with the aim of fighting “three evils”, terrorism, separatism and extremism. In reality, the SCO was searching for a role commensurate with Beijing’s dreams and a measure of Russian wariness in its own borderland backyard.
Initially, the original members of the SCO were taken up with such issues as the demarcation of borders of the former Soviet republics among themselves and with China. There was obvious geopolitical play between Moscow and Beijing because the former was cautious about the latter undertaking bilateral deals.
After the SCO completed its immediate task, there was vagueness about the organisation turning its attention to combating the three broad areas it had envisaged. And then, as manna from heaven for China, the Astana summit came after the high-powered Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) summit in China attended by 50 heads of state. And the SCO, Beijing decided, was the ideal forum to further the Chinese cause in developing its BRI promotion of a Chinese arc of influence through bountiful resources and surplus production capacity, In fact, President Xi Jinping’s spokesmen made a point of suggesting that the summit was in the “spirit” of BRI.
Where does India fit into this jigsaw puzzle? Mr Modi was a singular absentee at the Chinese BRI summit, for good reasons. The Chinese eastern corridor, part of an agreement with Islamabad, passes through Pakistan-occipied Kashmir. In any event, since the Chinese projects will take decades to become reality, there is plenty of time to reassess the shape they will take.
Is India then an odd man out in its role as a full member? First, it is good to be in, rather than out of, an organisation that touches national interests. Interestingly, India gave a positive spin to Mr Modi’s meeting with President Xi on the sidelines, with issues such as Beijing’s opposition to New Delhi joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group still hanging in the air.
While Moscow hopes to buttress the close relationship with India, particularly in defence, India can play its hand in an increasingly complex milieu of conflicting geopolitical conflicts. In a sense, SCO will play a role in defining latent Russian-Chinese tension. Iran is an observer in the SCO but is unlikely to become a member soon.
India’s desire to interact more closely with Central Asia is frustrated by Pakistan’s refusal to open its borders to through trade. This stalemate will continue. But the SCO could prove useful in providing a window on China’s future policies in furthering its ambition of shaping a future Chinese-centric Asia. It is useful to note that China immediately grasped the opportunity of leading the climate change debate after President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the Paris climate agreement. And Beijing will make full use of the US quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal of largely East Asian countries while keeping China out.
India’s full membership of the SCO will have other consequences. There is little doubt that China is in an expansionist mood and will fully exploit the Trump era, however short it might be, to look inward, rather than play its allotted role as the protector of the Western world and its safety as that of Asia and the wider world in the post-World War II scenario.
India has a more modest and important role to play in safeguarding its interests in its immediate neighbourhood and further afield in Asia and the Pacific. Despite President Trump’s unpredictability, there is no substitute for the close Indo-US relationship. And recent developments point to a closer relationship with Japan and Australia. As far immediate neighbours are concerned, except for Pakistan, they must decide for themselves where their interests are. They did attend the BRI summit.
China’s ability to realise its expansive dreams will depend upon a host of factors, among them the phase of instability administered by the Trump administration, the future shape of the European Union and Moscow’s ability to surmount its travails enhanced by Western sanctions.
India must plough its own course taking into consideration its troubled relationships close to home, brushing up the ties with the US, reaching out to a closer relationship with the European Union and keeping ties with Russia in good repair. The SCO is another instrument that can be employed to achieve a balanced setting in an unbalanced world.
India had an easier task in charting its course after independence. Much has changed in the world, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, which has emerged as the mightiest state in the European Union, and now the turning inward of the most powerful nation which has enjoyed the status of the sole superpower.
American strategists are suggesting that their country passes through 20-year cycles, with an outward-looking policy alternating with an urge to look inward. What is self-evident is that the world cannot wait another 20 years to find out. Indeed, the next decade will be important in determining how the future will look like.
For India, there is the problem of coping with a changing world while keeping the domestic scene as sane as possible. The ruling BJP’s target of changing the idea of India to its own conflicted ideology means that the domestic pot will keep simmering, even if it does not come to the boil. The need of the hour is to avoid divisions at home to cope with a chaotic world.
