Does India gain anything by hosting summits like SCO?

New Delhi is currently in diplomatic overdrive as it moves energetically from hosting one plurilateral meet after another. It pivoted from G20 to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) last week, hosting SCO’s foreign ministers’ meet in Goa. That event leads up to the SCO summit in New Delhi in early July – when President Vladimir Putin travels to India. Given Putin’s role in launching the Ukraine war and the arrest warrant issued in his name by the International Criminal Court for overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children, interactions between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be watched closely by global media. His visit could prove embarrassing for his hosts. It is just as well that Modi will be embarking on a state visit to Washington, DC on June 22, just before meeting Putin.The SCO summit will be followed by the G20 summit in early September. Chinese President Xi Jinping might attend one or both summits, a fraught prospect for New Delhi as Xi’s previous visits to India have been accompanied or followed soon after by trouble at the border.What does India gain by staging all these summits? The G20, arguably, has some value as New Delhi gets to sit down with the big boys of the world. What’s less clear is the utility of the diplomacy New Delhi conducts with an alphabet soup of China-dominated forums, such as Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) or Russia-India-China (RIC) besides the SCO.Do these summits matter?The world has changed dramatically and New Delhi isn’t alone in being slow to catch up. Many, both in New Delhi and in Western capitals, are inclined to think that current crises such as Russia-Ukraine or China-Taiwan will blow over soon – and “status quo ante”, as New Delhi likes to say, will be restored. This is as forlorn a hope as the status quo ante being restored on the India-China border.Xi predicts “dangerous storms” ahead, while foreign minister Qin Gang says China’s relations with the US are on “cold ice”. You could call it a new Cold War, the Great Game of our time. No amount of wishful thinking will make it go away. That doesn’t mean, of course, that summiteering involving both sides should stop. But a realist approach would also factor in underlying strategic realities and plan its own strategies accordingly. President Xi Jinping says China’s “power to shape the world” has increased.

Speaking at the twice-a-decade Communist Party meeting, Xi also warned of “dangerous storms” ahead https://t.co/a7xSG7nWRh pic.twitter.com/mNZ6FNE8Az

— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) October 17, 2022 The SCO focuses primarily on regional security and often describes the main threats it confronts as being terrorism, separatism and extremism. India is confronted by all three but receives little sympathy on this score from SCO. It’s ironic that the SCO has a permanent organ, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), dedicated to interdicting terrorists. According to a report in "The Diplomat", RATS had been instrumental in foiling 600 terror plots and extraditing 500 terrorists by 2017. But when did you last hear of any terrorist of interest to India being extradited through the good offices of RATS? On the contrary SCO’s leading light, China, comes to Pakistan’s defence whenever anti-Indian terrorists sheltering in Pakistan are sought to be sanctioned.Those contradictions stood out on May 5 when even as SCO foreign ministers met in Goa, five Indian soldiers were killed fighting terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir’s Rajouri district, coming on top of a similar incident in Poonch a fortnight ago. Foreign minister S Jaishankar used the occasion to mount a blistering attack on Pakistan for providing support to terror networks. But he didn’t call out Pakistan’s chief patron and enabler in that enterprise — China —and there wasn’t much of a response from other SCO members. medium100157384It's relevant to note here how SCO began. It was formed in 2001 in the heyday of American unipolarity, when China and Russia banded together to keep America out of Asia and roped in four Central Asian states. It called for multipolarity and rejected the American application for observer status in 2005. New Delhi wanted in because it too was worried about American unipolarity, and thought it could use Moscow’s good offices to balance Beijing within the SCO. It was also hoped that New Delhi could use the SCO platform to access the Central Asian states.Now, however, all those three wheels are coming off. We’ve moved away from the unipolar universe with China single-handedly challenging the US, while Russia has brought war to Europe’s doorstep. China also killed 20 Indian soldiers and turned the Line of Actual Control (LAC) ‘hot’ since the Covid pandemic broke, in what looks like a full-spectrum effort to contain India. Russia’s pursuit of its own ambitions in the Ukraine cut it off from Western technology and markets, turning it into a heavily sanctioned state too dependent on China to be able to proffer much help to India. India’s land connectivity to Central Asia has also been cut off by the joint China-Pakistan containment of it. Putting too many eggs in the basket of outfits such as SCO or RIC — whose main objective is to promote the security and propaganda interests of China and Russia, not India — looks like a losing bargain and a waste of diplomatic energy. medium100156638How Beijing made use of the previous US-Soviet Cold War to gain access to US technology and Western capital and thereby powered its subsequent rise, is an object lesson for New Delhi in strategic realism and opportunism. New Delhi, by contrast, opted to stay on the sidelines and adopted a non-aligned approach at the time. The consequences show up if you look at the trajectory of India’s gross domestic product (GDP). It was the sixth highest in the world in 1950, despite two centuries of British exploitation. By 1990, around the time the Cold War ended, it had sunk to 12th position.From unipolar to multipolarInterestingly India reversed that decline in the era of globalisation and US unipolarity, when the West held sway over the world’s multilateral institutions, even as official India decried those phenomena and aspired for multipolarity. India did pretty well in this era as it clawed its way back to what’s now the world’s fifth-highest GDP, while achieving the fastest declines in poverty in its history.Now that multipolarity is here — and Indian diplomats have what they earnestly desired earlier — it isn’t looking so good with devastating wars and pandemics, arms races both conventional and nuclear, and stepped up pressure on India’s borders. But winds of opportunity are blowing as well, with Washington, DC and other Western capitals working hard to woo New Delhi. Arch-rival Pakistan, which the West had favoured earlier, is now effectively in the China camp. ShowBlurbsCan New Delhi catch the wind in its sails this time, as Beijing did during the last Cold War? One certainly hopes so. But there are signs of Delhi reverting to its old, and failed, non-aligned policies even as pro-Bharatiya Janata Party thought leaders lose no opportunity to stick it to Nehru. Thus New Delhi attempts to balance its somewhat hesitant approach to the Quad with investment in a clutch of China-dominated outfits pursuing agendas favourable to Beijing and Moscow, while periodically invoking the “global South” – that amorphous entity with no real political existence.Time for New Delhi to heed the lessons of the last Cold War if it is to leverage this one. Geopolitical equations are changing fast, about which there’s insufficient clarity. Too much hedging and balancing will only confuse its friends and energise its adversaries, leaving New Delhi to plough a lonely furrow. Indian foreign policy discourse is old-fashioned and in need of an urgent update to cope with current realities.Read more from the author here