India is presiding over two influential international groupings this year– the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the G20. The country will host the 22nd Summit of the SCO Council of Heads of State on 4 July, 2023 in virtual format chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This is the first time India is presiding over the chairmanship of the SCO, which is significant for several reasons, prominent among which is India’s desire to cultivate closer ties with the five Central Asian countries. 

India’s SCO chairmanship comes at a time of global flux when events like the Covid-19 pandemic, Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war have upended several established notions of international politics, giving India a unique opportunity to steer dialogue on issues of importance to Eurasian politics and beyond. Closer relations with Central Asia, a region of geostrategic significance and part of India’s ‘extended neighbourhood’, remain a top priority for Indian policymakers. India can use the SCO as a multilateral platform to cooperate with the Central Asian republics and enhance connectivity, bolster trade ties and promote regional security. 

SCO at a glance

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, better known by the acronym SCO, is a Eurasia-based economic, political and regional security organization created in June 2001. In recent years, the SCO has gone beyond a narrow focus on security and military issues and actively promoted regional cooperation in such spheres as trade and economy, environment protection, education, transport-connectivity, energy, culture and people-to-people contacts. Currently, the SCO has eight full-members, namely, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

India at SCO

India became a full-member of the SCO in 2017 during the annual SCO Heads of State summit in Astana, Kazakhstan along with Pakistan. It had an Observer Status at the SCO since 2005 but realising the potential of the organization, India initiated the process for full-membership in 2015 at the Ufa Summit in Russia. This came following India’s renewed efforts at global engagement since Prime Minister Modi took over in 2014 and greater push to forge closer ties with the Central Asian region, hitherto of secondary importance to Indian foreign policy establishment. Other factors motivating India to join the SCO included fostering connectivity between Central and South Asia, promoting energy security, and counteracting terrorism and illegal narcotics trade. 

SCO’s Rising Profile 

The SCO is successor to the Shanghai Five grouping, which was formed on 26 April 1996 among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The grouping eventually transformed into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on 15 June 2001 and became functional with the signing of SCO Charter in June 2002. Since then, the SCO has continued to expand, both in terms of membership and range of issues it deliberates and cooperates on. The face value of the organization has parallelly enhanced, with the organization now representing around 40% of the World population and 30% of the Global GDP, making it the largest of all regional intergovernmental organizations. 

The SCO’s rising profile is evident by a desire from existing states to become full members and by others to apply for membership. For instance, Iran, an observer state since 2005, initiated the procedure to join as a member in 2021, signed the memorandum of understanding at 2022 Samarkand Summit and is likely to join the SCO as a full member during the annual SCO Heads of State Summit this year.

Central Asia as the Geopolitical Heart of SCO

Experts note that despite the expanding membership of SCO, focus remains on the Central Asian region. While the agenda and functioning at SCO is dominated by China due to its economic weight in Eurasia, and also by Russia due to its role in the creation of the organization, it is Central Asia that forms the geographical core of Eurasia. Out of the 22 SCO Summits held so far 13 have been held in Central Asian capitals, pointing to the region’s central position within the SCO. 

In fact, one of the original intentions behind SCO was to provide a platform to cooperate closely with the newly-independent Central Asian states on maintaining peace and stability in the volatile region, including settling boundary disputes and checking transnational terrorist and separatist groups. Consequently, Article 1 of the SCO Charter, which entails the main ‘goals and tasks’ of the SCO, exhort member states to “jointly counteract” the three evils of “extremism, terrorism and separatism in all their manifestations”. 

Central Asia’s strategic location as the heartland of Eurasia, its resource rich profile and shaky security situation in the wake of return of Taliban in Afghanistan, have all kept the region at the centre of SCO’s attention. Russia’s war with Ukraine has also generated a vacuum, leading to intense competition among powerful external actors, including the rising influence of China and other powers. Central Asian states in turn have tried to keep external power play at bay by leveraging their ‘Multi-Vector’ foreign policies. This has generated both opportunities and challenges for India. 

India’s Outreach to Central Asia via the SCO 

The SCO, especially, gives India a potent platform to deepen ties with Central Asia. This is partially because all five Central Asian states have authoritarian political systems and decisions are taken at the highest political level. Institutional mechanisms like the SCO Heads of State Council brings together top-most political executives of SCO states, where they can talk out important matters, otherwise not possible at bureaucratic or ministerial levels. 

It must be remembered that despite India’s earlier attempts at developing closer relations with the region, the magnitude of relations remained modest for most of the years. The relations with Central Asian republics were minimal throughout the nineties owing to their precarious socio-economic conditions and outreach efforts in the first decade of 21st century also did not yield much result,  as they were stymied every time by either Pakistan blocking land access or instability accruing out of Afghanistan roadblocking any real progress. 

India’s efforts at engaging with Central Asia are based on strong commercial and strategic interests however. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s maiden visit to all the five Central Asian countries in 2015 is a testimony India attaches to the region.  Moreover, for India the region is part of its ‘Extended Neighbourhood’ and contacts between the two are over millennia old. The region sits on abundant natural resources, both hydrocarbons and rare earth minerals, which are critical for India’s energy security. Already, the country imports substantial amounts of Uranium from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan needed for its civil nuclear programme. Supply of oil and gas from the region is under consideration as the country looks to diversify away from the traditional suppliers in the Persian Gulf region, though several previously planned projects such as the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India(TAPI) pipeline have failed to see the light of the day.  

Push for connectivity projects has however come from the highest political office in recent years, coinciding with India’s SCO membership and its active outreach to the region. It is paralleled by a desire among Central Asian states, most prominently from Uzbekistan, to connect Central Asia with South Asia. For instance, during the 2022 Samarkand Summit in Uzbekistan, Prime Minister Modi held talks with Russia, Iran and Uzbekistan to expedite connectivity projects along the North-South axis, including the International North South Transport Corridor(INSTC) and the Chabahar Project, along with linking Chabahar within the INSTC framework.

India has also used SCO as a platform to engage with Central Asian states on the issue of regional security centred on the return of Taliban in Afghanistan. Three of the five Central Asian states, namely, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, share land border with Afghanistan and are important stakeholders of whatever happens in country. In the previous stint of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, many of these republics, especially Tajikistan, were at the receiving end and tried to counteract international terrorism arising out of Afghanistan. 

Towards this end, the SCO established an SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group in 2018 in which India is an active participant. As the chair of SCO-RATS, India presided over a meeting in New Delhi on 14 October 2022, where all the member states decided on joint measures to counter threats posed by international terrorist groups operating from Afghanistan and prepare a unified list of internationally proscribed terrorists. This is significant as it comes amidst concerns that a Taliban-run Afghanistan is again becoming a safe haven of international terrorist groups such as the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State-Khorasan. 

While India has instituted several frameworks to cooperate with the region, such as the India-Central Asia Dialogue in 2019 and the India-Central Asia Summit in 2022, multilateral forums like SCO where other important stakeholders like China and Russia are present are always better. Working in tandem with key states in the region can bring about better outcomes, such as streamlining humanitarian efforts, curbing Taliban’s ability to arm-twist neighbours and curtailing finance networks of transnational narcotics groups, not to forget synchronising trade policies, capacity building through knowledge sharing, enhancing people-to-people contacts and exploring new avenues of cooperation. For instance, India’s expertise especially in water resource governance, given its prior experience with handling water sharing issues, and traditional medicine, given its age-old system of Ayurveda, are few examples where India can build on its strengths and cooperate more closely with Central Asian republics.

Conclusion

India can leverage the SCO as a multilateral forum to advance its geostrategic, economic and security interests in Central Asia. Hitherto an ignored region due to India’s excessive focus on its immediate neighbourhood and occasionally towards the East, it is the time to act North. The region can fulfil most, if not all, of India’s energy needs, throw open new markets and help stabilise the situation in Afghanistan. Keeping in line with India’s active outreach to the region since the last couple of years, the Central Asian states are also looking forward to greater cooperation with South Asia. India can, and it must, leverage the momentum it has to extend its influence in the region, using both soft and hard power instruments. 

Views expressed are the author's personal and do not represent PPF's view.