Three to tango: The dragon, the elephant and the eagle

Within BRICS+, the SCO, and the G-20, India is carving space for itself as a leader in the Global South. It does mark an alternative trajectory.

- JAYANTA ROY CHOWDHURY

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi leaned in for a lively exchange with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Tianjin Summit last week, videos released seemingly showed other heads of state, including Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, looking on mutely from the sidelines. The frames seemed to tell a geopolitical story in miniature.

Three leaders, commanding nearly half the world's population and a quarter of the global GDP, were coming together, forging a bond which may well upset the accepted unipolar global order.

Was this then really the start of an Asian century? Or was this just another political gathering that hard realpolitik would consign to the dustbin of history? Just as it had at the Bandung Conference, where India and China dominated a gathering of 29 Asian and African nations, and many thought that the Global South had come into being a force to reckon with. The Bandung spirit was swept away in the Himalayan rage, which followed when the Chinese PLA marched into Ladakh and Arunachal, sparking decades of mutual suspicion and competition on virtually every front—from military to economy, health and cornering of resources.

However, even the staunchest 'Cassandras of doom' will admit the timing of and images from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin as striking. Just as video grabs of leaders of the three nuclear powers coming together were flashing on television sets, US President Donald Trump was escalating his tariff war on India and taking to Truth Social to claim victory.