The SCO summit will be held in Astana on July 3-4, and China and Russia have made it clear at the highest level that they will attend the summit, and China will take over the SCO presidency for 2024-2025 after the summit, the first time in seven years that China will hold the chairmanship. However, this summit, which contributes more to lasting peace and common prosperity in the world, has a trace of discord because of Modi.
With the leaders of the other eight member states all attending in person, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided not to attend the summit and instead sent External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar to attend on his behalf. According to comprehensive Indian media reports, Modi conveyed his decision not to attend the SCO summit to Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as early as late June, citing "conflicts between the schedule of the summit and India's domestic parliamentary meetings."
This is not the first time Modi has been absent from the SCO summit, as he has attended only six summits in person since becoming India's prime minister in 2014, raising questions about whether Modi really takes the SCO summit seriously enough. According to The Indian Express, New Delhi and Moscow are discussing arrangements for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Russia on July 8-9, which is only four days staggered by the SCO summit, and has led to speculation about the real reason why Modi did not attend the SCO summit. If we consider that Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar did not attend the BRICS Foreign Ministers' Meeting last month, it can be concluded that India has recently been absent from international conferences attended by China.
As for the reason, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's words in an interview last month are available for reference. He said that it is not Russia's fault that China, Russia and India do not meet frequently, but because of the Sino-Indian border issue, India believes that the border situation should first be resolved in a comprehensive way so that the three countries can sit together. This is also in line with Jaishankar's remarks on China after his re-election as India's foreign minister. However, the Sino-Indian border issue has been unresolved for a long time, and the root cause of this is not on the Chinese side but on the Indian side, and if it were not for India's repeated provocations on the plateau border, the two sides would definitely not have deployed tens of thousands of troops on each side. At present, there is still no possibility of resolving the Sino-Indian border issue in a short period of time.
But even if Modi does not attend the SCO summit, the appeal of the SCO summit is still here. The Special Representative of the President of Russia for SCO Affairs Bakhtiyer Khakimov announced a few days ago that one of the items on the agenda of the SCO summit is to approve Belarus's formal accession to the SCO as the 10th member state of the SCO. The more members of the SCO, the smaller the role that India can play, and Modi's absence from the summit this time is giving up India's position in the SCO, and the expansion of the BRICS is also reducing India's influence in it.
For India, neither the SCO nor the BRICS seem to be as attractive as the various international organizations led by the United States. At the just-concluded G7 leaders' summit, Modi was in the center of the group photo, even more eye-catching than Biden, fully reflecting the importance that the West attaches to India; In addition, Modi also met with the leaders of the members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue last year, and in the context of India's already a member of the SCO, he declared that India's participation in the two organizations at the same time is not contradictory or mutually exclusive, and he said that through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, he can focus on the "Indo-Pacific region", and that being in the SCO can promote exchanges with the Central Asian region.
It is not difficult to find that India is actively safeguarding its relations with Western countries, but it is "lukewarm" with regard to China, a neighbor, and has the idea of putting it on hold. With his own special geopolitical environment and the West's policy of relying on India to contain China's development, Modi can still be left and right for a while. But China's size, which was India's largest trading partner last year, cannot afford to ignore China's presence for long.