PM Modi To Travel To Uzbekistan For SCO Summit Today; Set To Meet Putin, No Word On Meeting Jinping

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Uzbekistan today for the two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit, which is being held in the cultural capital of Samarkand.

Leaders are expected to review the grouping’s activities over the past two decades and discuss the prospects of multilateral cooperation.

The leaders set to attend the crucial meet include the host Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, President of Kyrgyz Republic Sadyr Japarov, and Tajkistan’s President Emomali Rahmon.

PM Modi is set to meet Russian President Vladimiar Putin on the sidelines of the summit and discuss issues of strategic stability, the situation in the Asia Pacific region and bilateral cooperation within the UN and G20, the Kremlin has announced.

The first in-person SCO summit since 2019 will be watched closely for the possibility of bilateral meetings on the sidelines with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Putin, and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif among the leaders expected to attend.

While there was no official word on whether Modi will have a meeting with Xi or Sharif, it will be after a long time that all these leaders will be at the same venue in person for a summit meeting.

Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper on Wednesday reported that Prime Minister Sharif has no plans to meet his Indian counterpart Modi in Samarkand, but did not rule out a brief courtesy meeting.

This will be the first in-person summit after June 2019 when the SCO summit was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The 2020 Moscow summit was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic while the 2021 summit at Dushanbe was conducted in a ‘hybrid mode’.

India’s presence at the summit is important because it will assume the rotational presidency of the SCO at the end of the Samarkand summit. Delhi will hold the presidency of the grouping for a year until September 2023. So, next year, India will host the SCO summit which will be attended, among others, by leaders of China, Russia, Pakistan.