Indian Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi will be attending the 20th Annual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) head of states summit. A statement by the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, Anurag Srivastava, said, “The prime minister will lead the Indian delegation to the 20th summit of the SCO Council of heads of state which will be held in the virtual format on November 10. The meeting will be chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin.” The SCO, which is considered as a “counterweight to the NATO,” is home to 42% of the world’s population, and 20% of the world’s GDP.
The meeting will be held virtually, with Russian premier Vladimir Putin as its chair. According to official Indian sources, PM Modi intends to bring up regional terrorism, the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan and collaboration on combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Since India joined the SCO in 2017, PM Modi has attended every heads of state summit.
Another important issue that will feature at the meeting is the grouping’s view of the global order, specifically in light of the recent election of Joe Biden as the President of the United States. While India and Pakistan have celebrated his victory and indicated their plan to work closely with the American leader, Russia and China’s silence on the issue indicates a continuation of hostility between the US and the two countries.
The meeting will be attended by state leaders of Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The grouping's four Observer States – Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus and Mongolia – will also be represented at the meet.
PM Modi will be meeting with the premiers of China and Pakistan for the first time since the upheaval of India’s border tensions with its two neighbours. As the meeting is being conducted in a virtual format, there will be no scope of conducting bilateral discussions between the leaders. However, it does provide a unique opportunity for PM Modi to bring up regional and global issues with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. India will also be meeting China in several other international and regional groupings in November, including the BRICS, the ASEAN and the G20. They are also likely to engage through the East Asia Summit on November 11.
The SCO meeting of the members’ National Security Advisors (NSA) was at the centre of a controversy in September, when Indian NSA Ajit Doval walked out after his Pakistani counterpart displayed the country’s “new” map depicting Indian territory as its own. According to Anurag Srivastava, the Pakistani NSA “deliberately projected a fictitious map that Pakistan has recently been propagating”, further adding that Pakistan proceeded to, expectedly, “present a misleading view of this meeting.”