SCO foreign ministers’ meet makes steady progress

In the just-concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organization Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) meet in Goa, current SCO chair and host India can draw satisfaction on having managed steady progress on 15 shortlisted discussion items plus five major draft documents to be finalized and enunciated during the SCO summit on July 3-4. 

These documents include the “New Delhi Declaration” for the upcoming summit plus four thematic joint statements on cooperation in de-radicalization strategies, promotion of millet cultivations, sustainable lifestyles to address climate change, and on digital transformation.

Together these are expected to take forward this year’s theme of “Secure SCO” that aims to promote multilateral, political, security, economic and people-to-people interactions.

Second, with the SCO now being in its third decade, India sought to push its perspectives on much-awaited reform and modernization. India has been especially vocal on making English, in addition to Russian and Chinese, the SCO’s third official language to ensure its wider global outreach and influence.

India was also able to ensure focus on countering all forms of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism, which remains one of the core and original mandates of the SCO. India also currently leads two SCO working groups on innovation and digital transformation.

But it is the issue of SCO expansion that perhaps was the most exciting part of the CFM deliberations.

SCO expansion

Expansion of the SCO has lately come to be a constant, consensus-driven and potentially groundbreaking part of its evolution. This growth underlines the SCO’s growing international relevance with its footprint, after starting off in Central and South Asia, now moving to include several nations from the Middle East region as its new focal point. 

As of now, the SCO has eight full members (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan) and four observers (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia). While the July summit is set to make Iran and Belarus its ninth and 10th members, the other two observers – Afghanistan and Mongolia – are expected to be the next to do so as well.

It is the number of the SCO’s dialogue partners that has witnessed a rapid increase. Beginning with Sri Lanka (2010), Turkey (2013), Cambodia (2015), Azerbaijan, Nepal and Armenia (2016), and Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (2022), several others such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Maldives, Myanmar and the United Arab Emirates remain the next aspirants and applicants. Some of them are expected to be included at the coming SCO summit.

The SCO started in 1996 as the Shanghai Five to connect China and Russia to their three newly independent Central Asian neighbors. Their initial task of demarcating boundaries and building trust was completed by 1999, which saw their focus shifting to energy security and countering terrorism.

In 2001, the Shanghai Five recast itself as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization by adding Uzbekistan, which also became the headquarters for the SCO’s Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure. 

Membership remained frozen since 2001 until India and Pakistan were added as new members in 2017. This has given a whole new turn to the SCO’s anti-terrorism strategies, with India playing a leading role in pushing this agenda, sometimes to the discomfort of Pakistan and that country’s closest ally, China, which has lately come to present itself as the new peacemaker.

Sino-Russian competition

Indeed, the pace of expansion portends SCO becoming a mini-United Nations minus the United States and its friends. This is where China’s role as the new peacemaker and the SCO’s rapid expansion begin to reveal a correlation.

The SCO has come to be seen as a grouping of China’s partners and friends. China’s mediation leading to the Saudi Arabia-Iran rapprochement followed by Iran being upgraded from observer to full member and Saudi Arabia joining the SCO as a new dialogue partner does lend credence to such suggestions. 

Indeed, there are speculations of Sino-Russia competition within the SCO. Interactions at the Goa SCO CFM saw experts speculating on Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov relying on Russia’s proximity with India to assert Moscow’s centrality to the SCO. Without doubt, the Ukraine war has further reinforced how the SCO remains Russia’s strongest support base and could create a situation of Sino-Russian competition enhancing India’s advantage.

China’s unprecedented rise has seen it use its economic leverage to cultivate its influence in SCO nations. All SCO members have China as their largest trading partner, and most of them are recipients of China’s Belt and Road projects. But this also makes India and Russia cautious of China’s pre-eminence.

China presenting itself as a peacemaker also brings focus on China-India border tensions, which were discussed during by Qin Gang’s and Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s 45-minute bilateral session, resulting in lip service for umpteenth time.

Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu was in New Delhi last week (April 27-28) to attend the SCO Defense Ministers’ meet. The two sides have also had 18 rounds of Core Commanders talks plus half a dozen ministerial meetings to no avail whatsoever. This mundane affair saw the SCO’s focus shifting from China to Pakistan.

Pakistan focus

The news that dominated media commentaries in India during the CFM was the visit by Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. This visit by a Pakistani foreign minister came after a long gap of over 12 years.

This also made a splash given that Pakistan has so far been noncommittal to India’s presidency of the SCO. For instance, at last week’s SCO Defense Ministers’ meeting, Pakistani Minister Khawaja Asif was first reported to join online, but in the end completely skipped the meeting. Meanwhile all seven of the other members’ defense ministers were sitting face to face in New Delhi. 

Hina Rabbani Khar was the last foreign minister of Pakistan to visit New Delhi in 2011. That makes it a seven-year gap if one counts the India visit by a former foreign minister of Pakistan, Sartaj Aziz. He had visited Amritsar in December 2016 to attend a “Heart of Asia”
conference on Afghanistan, and there were no bilateral meetings whatsoever. 

Bilawal Bhutto’s surname, his youth, flamboyance and use of social media all added to his presence in India. Indeed, his becoming Pakistan’s youngest ever foreign minister at 33 in April last year briefly created expectations, but in view of his history of acidic remarks on India, most commentators expect little substance from his debut visit to India.

In any case, in face of the strained India-Pakistan relations, Bilawal Bhutto’s India visit does deserve consideration. It is important to underline that his tone and tenor were visibly different. He held two bilateral meetings with his Russian and Uzbek counterparts and attended all other routine CFM-related events.

Notably, Bhutto’s warm handshake with his Indian counterpart during the gala dinner did make result in some media commentaries allude to his setting the stage for Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif attending the SCO Summit in person.

Positive spinoffs 

Finally, coming alongside India’s presidency of the Group of Twenty, which has faced a far more complex set of hurdles and invariably failed to achieve any consensus document so far, minor irritants and undercurrents in bilateral equations within the SCO CFM were surely not a matter of concern.

Indeed, given that SCO nations including China, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia are also members of the G20, the visible camaraderie in the SCO CFM could be expected to have positive spinoffs for India as host of the G20 summit, which, perhaps intentionally follows the SCO Summit.

Follow Swaran Singh on Twitter @SwaranSinghJNU.