Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-way handshake with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at last year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China, went viral across the global media. The optics were especially powerful because they came amid the Trump administration’s relentless pressure on India over trade and its purchases of Russian oil. President Donald Trump soon declared that the United States appeared to have “lost” India and Russia to China. The images intensified an argument in Washington over who lost India and reinforced the case for political reengagement with the Modi government, slowly but steadily stabilizing the relationship.
As it celebrates its 25th jubilee at a summit in Kyrgyzstan next week, the SCO will focus on regional stability, economic integration, transport connectivity, and digitalization. Measured against the Trump administration’s chaos and political disarray of the West, the China-led SCO will look more productive and purposeful. India, though, might not be too comfortable with the growing dominance of China over the forum, but it would want to make the best of the bilateral diplomatic opportunities presented by the summit, attended by a large section of leaders from inner Asia.
