Skand Tayal | SCO is at the crossroads: Will it remain relevant?

The 22nd summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) virtually hosted by India on July 4 has raised many questions on the continued relevance, focus and priorities of the 22-year-old grouping.

In a rather unfortunate coincidence, India became the host in 2023 of both the G-20, with a global outreach, and the SCO, a regional body. The agenda and activities hosted by India under the G-20 umbrella received a conscious priority over the activities under the auspices of the SCO, as evident from the absence of any SCO-related mass publicity when the entire country was plastered with the hoardings and posters of the G-20 logo and slogans.

The decision to downgrade the SCO summit and hold it virtually was probably taken after the May 4 meeting of the SCO foreign ministers in Goa, which was dominated by the unwarranted remarks of Pakistan’s foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and India’s acerbic response. The real SCO agenda was drowned in the resulting media cacophony.

Also, South Block might not have been comfortable with the presence of several prominent adversaries of the United States in New Delhi so soon after the historic meetings of the Prime Minister with President Joe Biden in Washington on June 22-23.

In any case, two decades after its establishment, the SCO is facing challenges of relevance, effectiveness and strategic orientation. With the admission of Iran and Byelorussia (next year), the SCO is widely perceived as an anti-West grouping led by China and Russia. The four Central Asian Republics -- particularly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan -- are not comfortable with this strategic orientation. In his statement at the Delhi summit, the thoughtful Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev said that the SCO must remain “nonaligned”. It is understood that when the 21st SCO summit was held in Samarkand in 2022, Uzbekistan was under considerable pressure from Russia and China to include language critical of the West in the Samarkand Declaration. In a similar vein, the incoming chairman of SCO, Kazakh President Kassym-Jormat Tokayev, said at the Delhi summit: “At this stage, the main task of our countries should be to prevent a geopolitical rift between the East and West.”

A concern shared by India and the Central Asian republics is to resist the attempts to widen the geographic ambit of SCO from Central Asia to Eurasia. There are old cultural, civilizational and historical links between Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent but not with Europe beyond the Ural Mountains. Reflecting this concern, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his presidential address at the Delhi summit said that the “SCO (should) focus on Central Asia’s interests and concerns”. The Delhi Declaration emphatically states that “Central Asia is the core of SCO”.

The other reality staring the SCO members in the face is the growing ineffectiveness and marginalisation of the SCO. India did organise 160 meetings, with 14 at the ministerial level, but there is little tangible to show as a concrete outcome. Prime Minister Modi alluded to the doubts about the working of the organisation when he questioned whether the SCO had the “ability” and “capacity” to meet the growing economic and strategic challenges. The Uzbek President was more blunt when he said that many SCO decisions remained only on paper, and he suggested an audit of all previous decisions. The incoming chairman, the Kazakh President, was also critical and said: “For more than 20 years it has not been possible to implement a single major economic project under the auspices of SCO”. In fact, India made a contribution to stem the flow of meaningless words: the Delhi Declaration is 5,000 words shorter than the Samarkand Declaration!

A sign of the marginalisation of SCO is that the last reported meeting of the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group was held in Dushanbe on July 14, 2021 at foreign ministers’ level. No SCO member has formally recognised the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but all have active bilateral contacts with the Taliban regime, and the immediate neighbours also have trade and transit channels. As the future of Afghanistan is of critical importance to the region, it is important for the members to attempt to coordinate their ongoing bilateral exchanges with the Taliban regime in a coherent and harmonised process designed to collectively seek some minimum outcomes – such as gender justice. An inert and passive approach leaves the field open to other initiatives. In fact, the Russia-led group – “Russia Plus Six” -- composed of all the immediate neighbours of Afghanistan -- has been much more active.

Another sign of the SCO’s marginalisation is China has started holding China-SCO summits where all five CARs, including Turkmenistan which is not a member of SCO, participate. The first China-SCO summit was held virtually in January 2022 and the second one in Xian on May 18-19, 2023, where the heads of all five Central Asian republics and President Xi Jinping were present. The Xian documents have 54 agreements and 19 new cooperation mechanisms. China announced financial support and grants to CARs amounting to $3.8 billion. This summit will now be held biennially.

India is increasingly seen as an “outlier” in the SCO. It does not endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is enthusiastically supported by all the other members. India was further isolated when it chose not to adopt the “SCO Development Strategy for 2030”. While no official explanation has been forthcoming about India’s reservations, the main concern for India could be the excessive influence of China over this strategy. India will not be comfortable with a China-designed and China- led strategy for the economic development of the region, that may bring the members in a tight economic embrace of the Dragon!

Questions have been raised in the media about the relevance of SCO membership for India. All analysts believe that India should continue to be an active member, with constructive proposals and meaningful participation. The four CARs are our partners in keeping the SCO strategically neutral and “nonaligned”. Further, the SCO has a major role to play in the regional connectivity projects and India can push routes connecting Central Asia and India via Iran rather than via Afghanistan and Pakistan. Also, the “Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure” (RATS) in Tashkent is a potentially useful body to co-ordinate anti-terrorism efforts of the member states.

The SCO is now at the crossroads. The members have a responsibility to look back, identify its operational weaknesses and refocus the grouping on a limited number of achievable outcomes. Otherwise, it is in danger of being reduced to a mere talking shop.