India After SCO Summit
By Piotr Opalinski
(Expert, Centre for International Relations, Poland)
The 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin offered India both visibility and a reminder of the structural limits of its Eurasian engagement. Since joining the SCO in 2017, New Delhi has sought to navigate between Moscow and Beijing, strengthen its foothold in Central Asia, and hedge against encirclement through alternative partnerships. The Tianjin gathering—with leaders of China, Russia, and Central Asia present—confirmed that the SCO is a useful platform for dialogue, but hardly one where India can decisively shape outcomes. China and Russia continue to dominate, Pakistan remains disruptive, and Central Asian states defer to the larger powers. For India, the SCO is therefore less about influence and more about presence: being at the table without expecting to rewrite the rules.
This reality forces New Delhi to think beyond Eurasia’s immediate geography. Russia remains a valuable partner—discounted energy, legacy defence cooperation, and strategic corridors like the Chennai–Vladivostok route is significant. Yet the risks are evident: exposure to Western sanctions, Moscow’s deepening dependence on Beijing, and limited scope for India to expand in Central Asia under Russia’s shadow. Over reliance on this axis narrows rather than broadens India’s strategic autonomy.
At the same time, the volatility of U.S. politics under Donald Trump’s presidency serves as another reminder that partnerships in today’s world must be judged not only by capability but also by predictability. India cannot afford to tie its long-term Eurasian and Indo-Pacific strategies to actors whose reliability is subject to domestic swings or geopolitical entanglements.
Here is where Europe, often overlooked in Indian debates on Eurasia, enters the picture. Unlike Russia’s transactional dependence or America’s political oscillations, the European Union offers India what it increasingly needs: stability, institutional reliability, and long-term partnership. For New Delhi, Europe is less a matter of crisis diplomacy and more a source of durable alignment. The EU’s legal frameworks, regulatory consistency, and commitment to rule-based cooperation provide precisely the kind of certainty that India requires as it seeks to build resilient supply chains, invest in digital infrastructure, and expand its global economic presence.
The EU has already signalled its readiness to invest in India’s rise. Initiatives such as Global Gateway, the European alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, align with India’s own demand for transparent, sustainable, and rules-based connectivity. The 2021 EU–India Connectivity Partnership laid the groundwork for cooperation in digital, transport, energy, and people-to-people exchanges. For India, plugging into these European-led initiatives means access to financing, technology, and political backing that can translate strategic rhetoric into tangible infrastructure. Unlike Chinese projects under BRI, Global Gateway prioritises transparency, local ownership, and environmental sustainability—principles much closer to India’s own developmental priorities.
Energy and climate cooperation offer another domain of complementarity. As India expands its renewable energy capacity and explores green hydrogen, Europe is positioning itself as a global leader in the green transition. Poland, with its ambitious offshore wind projects and growing expertise in hydrogen, illustrates how CEE states can add practical value. Collaboration in clean energy and climate innovation allows India to strengthen its sustainability agenda while simultaneously reducing vulnerability to geopolitical shocks in fossil fuel markets.
Within this European canvas, Central and Eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, emerges as a strategic facilitator. The country has transformed into NATO’s frontline security hub, with defence spending exceeding 4% of GDP and an ambitious modernization program that resonates with India’s own defence priorities. At the same time, Warsaw has positioned itself as a logistics gateway: its Baltic ports, the Three Seas Initiative, and north–south corridors create new arteries that can link India to Europe while bypassing Russian chokepoints. For a country like India, seeking both diversification and resilience, this connectivity is not peripheral—it is central to building credible alternatives.
But the story is not only about logistics and security. Poland’s growing technological ecosystem—in IT services, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and smart infrastructure—complements India’s ambitions in the digital domain. Moreover, as an increasingly influential voice in EU policy debates, Poland provides India with an entry point into shaping European positions on energy security, trade, and digital governance. It is also one of the EU member states most active in supporting the bloc’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, consistently advocating for stronger ties with democratic partners such as India, Japan, and Australia. This diplomatic activism strengthens India’s voice in Brussels and helps embed South Asia more firmly in Europe’s strategic imagination.
For Indian strategists, the lesson is clear: Eurasian engagement should not be framed as a binary choice between Russia and China, or even between Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Rather, it should be approached as a spectrum, where Europe, anchored in stability and values, can balance the uncertainties of other partnerships. By deepening its engagement with the EU, and leveraging Poland and the wider CEE as connectors, India gains not only access to new corridors and technologies, but also the predictability that comes from dealing with rule-based institutions.
This does not mean abandoning Moscow or diluting ties with Washington. It means broadening the toolkit. Russia will remain indispensable in defence and energy; the US continues to be India’s partner in high-tech and Indo-Pacific security. But neither provides the kind of structural stability that Europe can offer. In this sense, engaging Europe is not simply diversification—it is investment in resilience.
As India reflects on Tianjin and the SCO, the message is that presence alone does not guarantee influence. The real challenge lies in transforming visibility into strategic autonomy. Here, Europe—stable, predictable, and aligned with India’s democratic ethos—can serve as the partner that New Delhi needs to navigate an increasingly volatile world. By investing in European partnerships through Global Gateway, advancing joint clean energy projects, and working with Poland and other CEE states to connect Indo-Pacific and European strategies, India can secure not only short-term diversification but also long-term resilience. In a century marked by shifting alliances and intensifying rivalries, Europe offers India something increasingly rare: a partner that combines capability with predictability. — INFA