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As membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) grows – with Iran the latest participant in the just-concluded 23rd Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi – the debate over India’s role in the Chinese-dominated grouping also rages.
India’s association with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization began in 2005 as an observer state, and it became a full member state at the Astana summit in 2017. Interestingly, in China, despite the government eventually “allowing” India to join, the strategic affairs community was opposed to membership, Comparing the role of India and its presence within the assembly with the role of Turkey in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Now, China’s foreign policy analysts have welcomed Iran’s entry, saying it can “prevent India from completely destroying the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” In a popular left-leaning social media platform, blogger Xusheng (Empty Voice) accused India of spreading disharmony within the SCO, as the host country and the only member openly opposed to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and unwilling to support the initiative to set up the SCO Development Bank.
Commenting on India’s “problematic” role at the conclusion of the SCO virtual summit in New Delhi, Pan Guang, a well-known Shanghai-based China scholar, said: “Many scholars, including me and former ambassadors and diplomats, opposed India’s entry into the SCO. But The government in Beijing made the decision.”
In his remarks, Pan, a professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, noted that the expansion of the SCO is a very interesting process, and referred to the time when India was first admitted as an observer country into the SCO in 2005. “I remember President Hu Jintao telling Indian leaders that after India’s accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, there will be a new “platform” for resolving Sino-Indian relations.
On the contrary, scholars in China assert, India has already used its position as a member state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a “platform” to challenge and in fact embarrass China.
Some observers believe that India was admitted as a full member based on Moscow’s insistence that China counterbalance Pakistan’s push for membership in the organization. They say that although China agreed with the Russian view that Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi should unite in combating US-led Western hegemony in Asia, or especially in Central Asia and Eurasia, in reality, Moscow’s calculation was to co-opt India. On the one hand, it will continue to buy Russian weapons, and on the other hand, it will put pressure on Beijing and keep it sandwiched between Moscow and New Delhi.
Moreover, Beijing was in for a “surprise” when, with the Doklam standoff still continuing, New Delhi formally joined the United States, Japan and Australia at the Quadripartite Security Dialogue meeting in Manila three months later. What was of greater concern (for Beijing) was that the Quartet – the group of four countries – had been revived to “reflect changing attitudes toward China’s growing regional influence”.
It is pertinent to remember that just like Japan, Australia and the United States, which have been experiencing a steady decline in their bilateral relations with Beijing, the impetus for India to consider the importance of the Quad lay in the 73-day eyeball-eye confrontation on the border in the Doklam region.
Scholars in India and abroad have pointed out that apart from India’s accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the informal but “historic” friendship conferences in Wuhan and Chennai in 2018 and 2019 respectively between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping, the Doklam standoff was a harbinger. The fatal clash at the Galwan border in June 2020.
On another level, with Iran’s entry into the organization, many scholars have called for India’s expulsion from the SCO, pointing to the success of Modi’s official state visit to the US and India in the “soup of euphoria”. Indeed, some in China are already calling for the SCO to urgently introduce an “exit mechanism” and impose appropriate “constraints” on member states.
New Delhi, these scholars claim, went out of its way to dig deeper into China, and even Russia, by abruptly turning India’s first SCO presidential summit into a mere “two-hour online affair,” which was “an indirect way of showing a favor to Washington.”
A joke heard at last year’s SCO summit in Samarkand was that “China brings money, Russian guns, and India’s dignity to the SCO.” There was no dignity, a Chinese observer claimed, furious after the New Delhi virtual summit. There was only disharmony, disagreement and disagreement! “
Hemant Adlakha is Professor of Chinese at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also Vice President and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), Delhi.
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