India doesn’t endorse BRI at SCO meet

Sandeep Dikshit

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 14

India once again refrained from endorsing China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) at the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Bishkek on Friday.

The development comes against the backdrop of Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday asking Prime Minister Narendra Modi to consider joining the BRI’s Bangladesh China India Myanmar (BCIM) corridor. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale’s briefing did not mention the offer, but a Chinese rendering of the meeting between the two leaders mentioned that Xi called for India’s participation in the BCIM project.

The SCO, which goes strictly by consensus, had to make an exception due to the opposing views of India and China on the BRI. As a result, the joint communiqué which was released at the end of the SCO summit contained a sentence where all its members barring India reaffirmed their support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative and praised the results of its second marquee event held recently in Beijing.

India opposes the BRI on several grounds, including its disregard for sovereignty concerns in the case of the Pakistan China Economic Corridor which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as well as opaqueness in its strategic goal and terms of financing. However, for the first time, China has directly asked India to join a portion of BRI on its eastern flank which has no sovereignty issues attached to it.

The SCO summit also saw a toning down of its criticism of the US. The previous SCO summit in China has described the US attitude to world trade rules as “unconstructive and futile” while a preparatory meeting before today’s summit had talked of “joint resistance” against American trade highhandedness.

The final communiqué opted for the more sober formulation of “further improving the architecture of global economic governance, and deepening cooperation for the development of trade, economic and investment cooperation by strengthening the multilateral trading system based on WTO rules and regulations and through opposition to the fragmentation of global trade and trade protectionism in all its forms”.

The SCO summit was again unable to finalise the setting up of the SCO Development Foundation and the SCO Development Bank.