By TN Ashok
The picturesque Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, surrounded by mountains, green meadows and the stark beauty of Central Asia, produced an unusually consequential diplomatic tableau this week: Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin together under the same roof, with Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif watching from the sidelines and, at one point, apparently hurrying after Putin for a handshake. The Bishkek summit was the 26th meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of State and marked the organisation’s 25th anniversary.
For India, the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit was less about dramatic agreements than about diplomatic positioning. Modi managed to do something increasingly difficult in a fractured world: maintain productive equations simultaneously with China and Russia while putting Pakistan’s terrorism problem squarely on the SCO agenda.
The summit also handed the organisation’s rotating chairmanship to Pakistan. That makes the Bishkek outcome particularly significant. The next SCO Heads of State meeting will be held in Pakistan in 2027, placing New Delhi in the unusual position of having to participate constructively in an organisation chaired by a country with which it has no normal political dialogue.
Modi’s message to Xi: engagement without surrender; The most politically significant encounter was arguably the Modi-Xi interaction.
There was no dramatic breakthrough announced between India and China. Nor should the brief exchanges between the two leaders at the summit be mistaken for a new strategic understanding. But the optics mattered. Modi and Xi were seen speaking during the summit’s official proceedings, signalling that the two Asian powers are prepared to maintain high-level communication even while substantial differences remain.
That is useful diplomacy for New Delhi. India does not want the SCO to become simply an extension of China’s geopolitical influence. Nor does it want its participation reduced to an anti-American or anti-Western platform dominated by Beijing and Moscow. By remaining engaged with Xi while simultaneously asserting India’s independent positions on terrorism, connectivity and global conflicts, Modi demonstrated the strategic autonomy that has become the central theme of Indian foreign policy.
The message was essentially: India can sit with China without becoming China’s camp follower.
Putin: friendship, trade — and a gentle reprimand: With Vladimir Putin, Modi had a considerably more substantive bilateral conversation.
The two leaders reviewed the India-Russia strategic partnership, including trade, investment, energy and defence cooperation. Modi also made clear that India wants the Ukraine war to end. He told Putin that humanity must move from “endless wars to ending wars” and said India would continue to support every genuine peace effort.
This was an important balancing act. India remains one of Russia’s major economic partners, particularly in energy, while Moscow remains a crucial defence supplier. Yet New Delhi has consistently resisted becoming an apologist for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Modi therefore managed to preserve the warmth of the India-Russia relationship without surrendering India’s independent position on Ukraine.
The timing is also significant. Putin is expected in India for the BRICS summit, making the Bishkek conversation a useful staging point for a larger bilateral engagement.
The Pakistan problem — without naming Pakistan: If Modi’s biggest diplomatic success was managing China and Russia, his clearest political success was getting India’s terrorism concerns reflected in the final SCO document.
Standing in the same room as Shehbaz Sharif, Modi called terrorism a grave challenge to humanity and demanded that the entire ecosystem supporting terrorism be dismantled — financing, recruitment, radicalisation and safe havens.
He went further, warning countries that use terrorism as an instrument of policy that terrorism can never be a strategic asset.
The language was unmistakably relevant to India’s long-standing accusation that Pakistan provides space and support to anti-India terrorist organisations, although Modi did not name Pakistan.
More important was what subsequently appeared in the Bishkek Declaration.
The SCO leaders declared that “double standards” in the fight against terrorism were unacceptable and called for international action against terrorism, including the cross-border movement of terrorists. The declaration also condemned attempts to exploit terrorist, separatist and extremist organisations for selfish purposes.
That is precisely the diplomatic vocabulary India has been seeking.
It does not constitute an SCO indictment of Pakistan. Pakistan itself portrayed itself as a victim of terrorism and rejected the idea that it sponsors terrorism. But the wording gives India considerably more diplomatic room to argue that terrorism cannot be separated from the countries and networks that finance, shelter or facilitate it.
The Shehbaz Sharif optics ; Pakistan’s prime minister had his own problems with optics. A video showing Sharif apparently hurrying after Putin following the family photograph became viral. It was interpreted by Indian social media as evidence of Pakistan’s eagerness to remain close to Moscow.
Then came an avoidable photographic blunder. Pakistan’s Prime Minister’s Office initially circulated an altered version of the SCO family photograph in which Modi and some other leaders had been cropped out. The image triggered an immediate backlash. Sharif subsequently posted the complete photograph with Modi restored.
The episode was diplomatically embarrassing because the photograph was not merely a picture. It was the visual representation of the SCO’s collective leadership.
For Pakistan, which is about to chair the organisation, appearing to manipulate that collective image was particularly unfortunate. Pakistan has now taken the rotating chairmanship for 2026–27, with the next Heads of State meeting scheduled in Pakistan in 2027.
Sharif is trying to cultivate Washington while simultaneously seeking Russian and Chinese backing in the SCO, trying to imitate Modi’s sovereignty stand, but Sarif is no Modi and his foreign office is nowhere near the experienced diplomacy of Indias south block initiatives. India can buy Russian oil and yet negotiate a 500 billion deal with Washington while talking with China amid border clashes and Arunachal issue and can buy weapons from Israel and the USA without upsetting its equations with Russia.
Shariff is not accepted as a Muslim leader among Arab nations however hard he might try. But his efforts in brokering peace talk between USA and Iran and acting as an interlocutor has been much appreciated though it did not yield concrete results in ending the war.
What did the Bishkek Declaration achieve? The declaration was considerably broader than terrorism.
The leaders endorsed cooperation on security, trade, investment, energy, transport, technology, environmental issues, tourism and other areas. Twenty-eight documents were approved, including amendments to the SCO Charter and arrangements for a new Universal Centre for Countering Challenges and Threats to the Security of SCO Member States.
The organisation also condemned military strikes against Iran and reaffirmed opposition to unilateral coercive measures that it regarded as contrary to international law and the UN Charter. On Afghanistan, it called for an independent, neutral and peaceful country free from terrorism, war and drugs, while stressing the importance of an inclusive political order.
For India, another seemingly technical decision was strategically useful: English was added as an official and working language of the SCO. India also secured recognition for initiatives involving young scientists, young authors and the SCO Civilisation Dialogue Forum.
Now comes Pakistan’s turn ; Pakistan inherits the chairmanship under the theme “Turning Vision into Action: Connectivity, Innovation and Shared Prosperity.”
That theme contains both opportunity and danger. Pakistan will naturally want to place connectivity at the heart of its chairmanship, with China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as an important element of its economic diplomacy. China remains Pakistan’s principal strategic partner and has continued to push the next phase of CPEC, including Gwadar and regional connectivity.
But CPEC runs through territory claimed by India, making it one of the most sensitive issues in India-China-Pakistan relations.
The SCO could therefore become a battleground over the meaning of connectivity itself. Beijing and Islamabad will want infrastructure and corridors treated as instruments of regional integration. India will insist that connectivity must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity.
That contradiction may become the central diplomatic test of Pakistan’s chairmanship.
The SCO is already an extraordinary grouping: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus and the Central Asian republics sit together despite radically different interests. Its strength is precisely that it provides a table at which adversaries can remain in conversation.
Its weakness is that those same rivalries make consensus difficult.
Bishkek therefore produced no grand India-China reconciliation and no India-Pakistan thaw. What it produced was arguably more useful: India demonstrated that it can work with China, remain close to Russia, confront Pakistan rhetorically on terrorism and still operate inside a China-influenced Eurasian institution without becoming subordinate to it.
For Pakistan, the real challenge begins now. Islamabad has inherited the SCO chair. It must prove that it can be an honest convenor of a grouping in which India is one of its most important members — and one with which it currently refuses normal bilateral engagement.
The mountains surrounding Bishkek may have provided the summit’s picturesque backdrop. But the real terrain ahead is much steeper.
The strongest angle, in my view, is “Pakistan inherits the chair but India has shaped the security vocabulary”—it gives your piece a sharper analytical spine than simply recounting the summit. (IPA Service)
