India Must Question the Utility of SCO

The SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) defence ministers' summit last week in Beijing ended without a joint statement.

- HARSHA KAKAR

The reason, as mentioned by India, was that Pakistan and China were attempting to divert attention away from terrorism. In case India had inked the statement, it would have impacted our strong stance on cross-border terrorism as also regional security.

The draft joint statement did not mention Pahalgam but included the ongoing 'freedom struggle' in Baluchistan, which was termed as 'terrorism'. Evidently, China was backing Pakistan, as its own investments in Baluchistan's gold mines and the CPEC were impacted. Pakistan also wanted to include the Jaffar train hijacking in the statement. In both cases, the intent was to link India to the Baloch freedom movement.

India's refusal displayed that it will not bend on its national interests as also its strategic autonomy. The Indian foreign office mentioned, "On our side, India wanted concerns on terrorism reflected in the document, which was not acceptable to one particular country." The country was Pakistan, backed by China. Pakistan feared that the statement would make it accountable as a sponsor of terrorism in India.

Rajnath Singh in his address at the meet, mentioned, "It is imperative that those who sponsor, nurture and utilize terrorism for their narrow and selfish ends must bear the consequences. Some countries use cross-border terrorism as an instrument of policy and provide shelter to terrorists. There should be no place for such double standards. SCO should not hesitate to criticize such nations." While the SCO does not permit individual disputes to be projected in the organization, members raise issues without naming the countries concerned.

What further backed India's stance was that the chapter on 'goals and tasks' in the SCO Charter mentions that members will 'jointly combat terrorism, separatism and extremism in all its manifestations.' Contrary to this, the joint statement avoided mentioning terrorism.