NEW DELHI, 3 Jul: President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.
\nLeaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.
\nThis year\u2019s event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It\u2019s the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the country\u2019s growing global clout.
\nThe group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say.
\nThe forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.
\n\u201cThis SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility,\u201d said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center\u2019s South Asia Institute.
\nNone of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
\nFor Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
\n\u201cPutin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed,\u201d said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
\nIndia announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.
\nFor New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and China\u2019s leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.
\nAfter all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, \u201cit would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders,\u201d Kugelman said.
\nIndia\u2019s relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to China\u2019s growing ambitions.
\nA key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies\u2019 summit in September. It\u2019s also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.
\n\u201cIndia glorifies in this type of foreign policy where it\u2019s wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time,\u201d said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.
\nNew Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls \u201ccross-border terrorism\u201d \u2014 a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.
\nIt may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty \u2014 a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.
\nAnalysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.
\n\u201cThe limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India\u2019s independent foreign policy,\u201d said Madan.
\nThe SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.
\n\u201cFor countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. … I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding,\u201d said Kugelman. (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI, 3 Jul: President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support. Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-219652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}