Inclusion of India in SCO Will Help To Integrate BRICS Nations Further, Says Global Times

The inclusion of India, along with Pakistan, two major South Asian nations, as full members will enable the security grouping of SCO to realize its full potential, said China’s Tsinghua University research professor Xie Chao, in an article Tuesday in China’s state-run Global Times.

“It is high time for both [India and China] to try more concerted efforts in multilateral security forum. For instance, a joint work is urgently required for their joint efforts to fight terrorism, especially the threats posed by radical Islam and drug trafficking from neighboring Afghanistan. The latter is a neighbor of nearly all the countries in the SCO,” said Xie Chao.

At the recently concluded BRICS and SCO summits at Ufa, one of the most important decisions made was the plan to integrate China’s Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) under the auspices of the SCO. On the integration, strong support was lent by both China and Russia.

Rejecting the views of some analysts who consider that inclusion of India and Pakistan — who have a number of unsettled bilateral disputes and have fought three short wars over those disputes — would be disruptive for SCO, Xie said in his article that “there is no record of India bringing bilateral issues to multilateral forums. As a matter of fact, it is in its interest to keep the issues in the region rather than drag in outside powers.”

On the contrary, the article pointed out that “the SCO will provide another platform for China to discuss its relations with India when both are finding a range of issues of common interests, together with all other members in the bloc. Actually history has proven that they can cooperate very well in a bunch of multilateral framework.” “It was a political decision for China to accept more powers into the bloc since the expansion is unavoidable. All in all, an open SCO is better than a closed one,” Xie concluded.