PM Modi should not expect much to come out of SCO summit

It’s that time of the year again, when we are going to be “treated” to a slew of banalities coming out of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). While building up the suspense and making mountains out of molehills is an indispensable part of a 24/7 news cycle, the fact remains that in an era where multilateral organisations are producing diminishing returns, the SCO is a forum with lesser returns than the abysmal international average.

The SCO, as it stands, is a contradiction in economic and political terms. Economically it has China, an industrial country stuck in a middle income trap seeking new markets. Then there is Russia, a deindustrialised state that lives on income earned through the sale of minerals and fossil fuel. Then there is India, neither industrialised, nor resource rich and finally the Central Asian countries, each of them overwhelmingly dependent on China or Russia for their well-being.

Russia still mistrusts China politically (much of its nuclear and air defence batteries are still deployed close to the border) but is inexorably moving into Chinese orbit, given Russia’s alienation from the west, and China’s voracious appetite for Russian fuel. India for its part is even more distrustful of China, as are the central Asian states, but not one of them has the guts to stare down China. Then, of course, there is the difference in political systems: India a full democracy, Russia a controlled democracy with some measure of personal freedoms, China’s civil liberties eroding everyday and having just crowned an emperor for life, and Central Asian states whose leaders occasionally name cities, days of the week, the currency after themselves and their mothers and boil their opponents alive. India seeks peer validation from America, Putin’s acute inferiority complex means his only target of peer approval is Germany and Europe and the Chinese keep wondering why no one seeks or accepts the peer approval they bestow, so much so, that even when Russia moves into Chinese orbit, the approval of the Chinese means nothing to Putin. Politically and reputationally then this formation is a stillborn.

What about geopolitics then? The Chinese have declared that this summit will focus on terrorism. By terrorism of course they mean the kind that affects them: Uighur Muslim terrorism. This produces mixed reactions in the Central Asia republics, because the Turkic Uighur are, their kith and kin, and their repression causes angst. On the other hand, given these states are all fighting their own Islamist movements, the “stans” have no option but to carry on the ideological fight, despite the ethnic tensions it creates. This, of course, is where it gets interesting. China’s only real utility for Pakistan is the fact it keeps India off balance and bogs down US troops in Afghanistan, preventing it from becoming a “western island”. The method for doing this is terrorism — China having nixed India’s ambitions to have several terrorist organisations banned and indeed have wanted figures like Masood Azhar declared a terrorist by the UN. Now Pakistan is also the hotbed of terrorism emanating against Uzbekistan, and indeed China. So China’s security calculus is that terrorism isn’t bad per se, just terrorism directed against it. In effect the cost benefit analysis of the situation is that terrorism should be allowed to continue, even if it occasionally erupts in Xinjiang province, just as long as it destabilises others more. Since the Stans have no real enemies, this is a proposition that doesn’t work for them just as it doesn’t work for India. Surprisingly Russia also is now pivoting to a position that to end terror directed at them from Pakistan, they have to “engage” with Pakistan — something the Americans found out doesn’t work and doesn’t exactly gel with the Chinese view of both the directability or utility of terror. Clearly then geopolitically the SCO is stillborn.  

This then leaves the economic proposition that is the SCO. On a variety of issues such a global governance, freedom of space, freedom of information all critical to the economy, India has diametrically opposite views from Russia and China. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a project that one is yet to see a cost benefit analysis of, leave alone a cogent one, in effect walking Central Asia into a debt trap. Russia is now building a corollary/counter (depending on your point of view) called the North-South transport corridor. What is common to these ventures (and indeed to the Indian Chahbahar to Afghanistan link) is they believe infrastructure can substitute for the lack of markets, lack of economic viability, entrepreneurship, capital, trained labour. High-value addition products (such as chips and mobiles), fuel etc are commodities unsuited for road or rail transport, preferring air (due to the short market life of electronics) and pipelines. In that sense these connectivity projects are literally castles in the air — transported from a Pan-European model that is simply not applicable in Asia. Clearly then, economically speaking, the SCO is a stillborn.

The abject failure of BRICS (its sole purpose seems to be to rubber-stamp Chinese economic/strategic ventures) and the fact that RIC (Russia, China, India) never took off means that this is a trio that is simply not meant to be, in any permutation or combination, as global south, as global east, or indeed as global anything. Anyone saying otherwise is simply deluded.

The writer is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. Views are personal.