The Room India Cannot Afford to Leave
From Tashkent to Bishkek, India’s journey through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation mirrors
the changing map of Eurasian power. The question now is not whether India belongs in the room,
but whether it can help shape what happens inside it.
Narendra Modi spent two days in Bishkek this week making the case that the SCO should now be
judged on security, connectivity and opportunity, and on those same two days, a tribunal in The
Hague ruled that the Indus Waters Treaty remained legally binding despite India’s decision to place
it in abeyance. India rejected the ruling in a statement issued, pointedly, from Bishkek itself. The
coincidence said something true about why India sits inside the SCO at all: not because it agrees
with everyone else at the table, but because it cannot afford to let others settle Eurasia’s future
without it.
The photograph from the summit made the same point in one frame. Modi shared the stage with Xi
Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Shehbaz Sharif, alongside the presidents of Iran, Belarus and the Central
Asian states, hosted by Kyrgyzstan’s Sadyr Japarov. Modi spoke of terrorism, Sharif of water, Putin
of partnership, Xi of deepening Eurasian cooperation. All ten members signed the Bishkek
Declaration marking the organisation’s 25th anniversary. To make sense of it, start not in 2026 but
in Tashkent.
Tashkent has occupied strikingly different positions in India’s diplomatic memory. On 10 January
1966, it hosted the Tashkent Declaration, signed by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and
Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan to end the 1965 war. Shastri died in Tashkent the next morning; for
a generation of Indian diplomats, the city became shorthand for the hard work of managing peace
with Pakistan. A quieter Tashkent story runs alongside it. India and Uzbekistan established formal
diplomatic relations there on 18 March 1992, elevated to a Strategic Partnership in 2011. Modi
visited in 2015 and 2016, and the 2016 trip mattered most: it was in Tashkent that year that the
process for India’s SCO membership was launched, clearing the path to full membership in 2017.
A decade later, Modi returned to Tashkent on 30 August 2026, received at the Kuksaroy
Presidential Palace by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who conferred on him the Order of Oliy
Darajali Do’stlik, Uzbekistan’s highest honour. The two countries elevated ties to a Comprehensive
Strategic Partnership, with a $5 billion trade target by 2030, a framework for long-term uranium
supply, and new cooperation on critical minerals. Before leaving, Modi paid tribute at the Shastri
Memorial. The gesture closed a loop: the Tashkent that once hosted the hard business of ending a
war with Pakistan is now where India is building its future with Central Asia instead.
The organisation itself began far narrower. In 1996, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan formed the Shanghai Five for border security. Uzbekistan joined in 2001 and the group
became the SCO, built around terrorism, separatism and extremism. India, Iran and Pakistan gained
observer status in 2005; India applied for full membership in 2014, the decision to admit India and
Pakistan was taken in 2015, and both formally joined in June 2017. Iran followed in 2023, Belarus in
2024: ten full members now, with a widening ring of observers and dialogue partners.
That expansion changed what the SCO was for: a body built to police a shared frontier became a
general-purpose Eurasian forum, which is exactly why India needed a seat. Its calculation was never
sentimental. Some read the SCO as a Beijing- and Moscow-led counterweight to the West; India’s
actual bet was narrower: its interests in Central Asia, Afghanistan, energy and counter-terrorism,
and increasingly technology and critical minerals, could not be defended from outside an institution
starting to set the rules. Staying out would not have bought India strategic autonomy; it would only
have narrowed the tools to exercise it.
That is what made the 26th summit, marking the SCO’s 25th year, more than a scheduling
milestone. Modi offered a three-word formula for its next quarter-century: security, connectivity,
opportunity: security enabling development, connectivity deciding whether geography helps or
hurts, opportunity making any of it durable. Underneath sits a harder contest: who finances
Eurasia’s roads and railways, who sets its energy corridors, who builds its digital backbone. Not
technical questions. Questions of power.
Modi pressed India’s oldest SCO argument: that the fight against terrorism cannot be selective,
calling for dismantling its financing, recruitment and safe havens, a line aimed at Pakistan, which
shares that table even as it sits, in New Delhi’s accounting, at the centre of the threat. Sharif
insisted Pakistan was terrorism’s victim, not its sponsor. That gap won’t close on a joint declaration.
It widened further over water. Sharif called water the region’s lifeblood and warned against
weaponizing it. India placed the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance a day after the April 2025
Pahalgam attack that killed 26 civilians, arguing that its operation could not continue as before
while Pakistan failed to address cross-border terrorism, a political justification distinct from the
treaty’s own text, which allows termination only by mutual consent under Article XII. Pakistan
disputes that the abeyance is lawful and, in March 2026, asked a Permanent Court of Arbitration
tribunal, constituted under the treaty’s own dispute-resolution annex, to rule on its status. India
never recognised the tribunal’s jurisdiction and didn’t take part. It ruled anyway, during the Bishkek
summit itself, holding that the treaty remained fully in force and that neither the treaty nor
international law provided a basis for unilateral suspension, and imposing interim restrictions on
construction at India’s Ratle hydropower project. India rejected the ruling as null and void, again
from Bishkek. Modi and Sharif weren’t merely talking past each other on stage; they were narrating
a live legal dispute in front of the organisation built to keep such disputes from spiralling. The SCO
can host the disagreement. It has no power to settle it.
Then there is Russia, and the relationship deserves more nuance than a simple drift-away story
suggests. Ties have survived the Cold War’s end and three decades of shifting alignments, and
remain substantial in defence and energy. What has changed is Russia’s strategic position, not
India’s assessment of the relationship: sanctions and the Ukraine war have pushed Moscow into far
closer dependence on Beijing than five years ago. India reads that shift clearly, but reading it
accurately is not the same as downgrading the relationship, as Modi’s Bishkek message to Putin
showed: pressing for peace in Ukraine while signalling that the bilateral relationship itself remains
important. The same instinct runs through India’s SCO posture: engaging China without adopting its
terms, working with Washington without becoming a treaty ally. That is not fence-sitting. It is what
a networked foreign policy requires when relationships move at different speeds at once.
China is the harder problem, and India has no illusions about matching it. Over a decade of Belt and
Road financing has given Beijing rail lines, ports, pipelines and fibre-optic corridors across Central
Asia that India cannot replicate at comparable speed, lacking a direct land route into the region.
Pakistan blocks India’s overland access; China has spent the years since 2013 filling that vacuum.
Bishkek showed the distinction clearly: eight SCO members, Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, reaffirmed their support for the Belt and Road Initiative
in the summit declaration. India did not, maintaining its longstanding position that connectivity
must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity. India’s answer isn’t to out-invest Beijing project
for project; it is to ensure that Central Asian states are never dependent on a single supplier. That is
the logic behind Chabahar port, the International North-South Transport Corridor, and India’s push
into pharmaceuticals, digital infrastructure and education across the region: not a bid to displace
China, but an insurance policy for countries that would rather not rely on one road. Connectivity, in
this sense, is not infrastructure alone. It is influence made physical. The $5 billion Uzbekistan trade
target, the uranium supply framework and the critical-minerals cooperation are the concrete
architecture of that bet.
Bishkek also confirmed how far the SCO has drifted from its founding mandate: AI, digital
cooperation and financial mechanisms now sit alongside terrorism and border security. Turkey’s
Erdoğan, attending as a dialogue partner, said Ankara would consider full membership without
stepping back from NATO, a remark that says more about the organisation’s trajectory than its
communiqués. States aren’t defecting from one camp to another. They’re collecting memberships,
treating platforms as additive, not exclusive.
Which raises the real question: is the SCO a bloc, or something else? Calling it an anti-Western bloc
is tidy but wrong. It is China-weighted in practice: Beijing carries enormous economic and political
weight, and convened its predecessor. But that is not the same as being able to compel every
outcome, in the sense that matters most: forcing decisions others won’t accept. India has resisted
language it disagreed with before, and still does. Russia and China are close but not identical;
Central Asian states hedge between several capitals; India and Pakistan cannot even agree on the
language of terrorism. None of that is how an alliance behaves. It is how a network behaves: states
arrive with different interests and leave having advanced only some of them. For India, which has
never wanted to be locked into anyone’s bloc, operating inside a China-weighted institution
without being dictated to by Beijing is a far more useful position than standing outside it.
The first 25 years of the SCO were about assembling an organisation. The next 25 will be about
building the architecture: the roads, grids and financial plumbing that determine how Eurasia
trades, moves and defends itself. China will try to write the specifications; Russia will try to keep its
seat despite diminished leverage; Central Asia will keep hedging; Pakistan will keep pressing for
relevance. India’s task is not to win that contest outright, but to keep it open: deepening Central
Asian ties without making them anti-China, holding Russia without denying how the Russia-China
relationship has changed, engaging Beijing without ceding strategic space, pressing the terrorism
argument without letting Pakistan’s presence paralyse the wider agenda. That is what strategic
autonomy looks like in 2026: not neutrality, but holding several relationships at once without
letting any one set India’s terms.
Tashkent once hosted the hard work of ending a war with Pakistan. It has just hosted the far more
hopeful work of building India’s next chapter with Central Asia. Bishkek did something rarer still: it
held terrorism, an unresolved water dispute, a live arbitration ruling and the outline of Eurasia’s
next quarter-century in the same two days, under the same roof. The geography has not moved an
inch. The stakes have moved a great deal.
None of this makes the SCO comfortable for India, and it was never supposed to. India did not walk
in because it agrees with the states inside it: on terrorism, on water, in places even on China, it
plainly does not. It walked in because the alternative was worse: leaving Beijing, Moscow and
Islamabad to settle the continent’s future in a room India had chosen to leave empty. That has been
the calculation since 2017. It still is.
India does not need to own the room. It needs to ensure that no single power owns it. That is why,
at 25, the SCO is a room India simply cannot afford to leave.
Dr. Gaurav Vaid
Writer & Analyst
gauravvaid2010@gmail.com
Source: https://greaterjammu.com/epaper/epaper/edition/1087/epaper4-9-2026/page/6