CNN18 (India) panel discussion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit

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This has been a very hectic day of interviews and panel discussions with three Indian broadcasters – News X, News X World and CNN18.  The visit of their Prime Minister Modi to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit has been followed in India with at least as much attention, probably more than in Russia, where it was the number one news item on the weekly summary program last night.

Regrettably, the Indian broadcasters are so overloaded with work that they have not forwarded to me links to these programs in which I participated, with one exception so far, the link below from CNN18.

I offer this not so much for the sake of what I had to say but to share with the Community the angle of interpretation that the Indian broadcasters are using for their audiences.

This particular video was recorded before 11 am European time.  A video interview/panel discussion with News X in the mid-afternoon was remarkable for the gloating of the Indian journalist and panelists over the humiliation of Pakistan at the summit. What they have in mind is one point in the closing declaration of the summit issuing a rebuke over ‘cross-border terrorism’ that made possible a deadly attack on Indian Kashmir.  The unnamed sponsor of terrorism was, of course, Pakistan, and the incident prompted the brief Indian-Pakistani air war that Donald Trump has taken credit for resolving.

Regrettably, Indian broadcasters seem to be missing the truly historic nature of the SCO summit for their country, which lay not in the fall of Pakistan but in the prospects for a rise of their own country to a managing position in the SCO.  Let us remember that from its founding at the beginning of the new millennium, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was primarily an instrument for Russia and China to moderate their competing interests in Central Asia and to keep out the Americans, the Europeans and other interlopers. It was focused on combatting terrorism and narcotics trading.  The working languages of the SCO were and remain Russian and Mandarin, which tells you who is running the show.

Now, with India in the midst of a painful spat with the United States, with the work of 25 years by successive American administrations to inveigle India in its scheme for building an alliance to counter Chinese growth and influence in the Indo-Pacific region shredded and in tatters, the moment has come for India to realize its nonalignment and sovereignty by assuming a leading role in the SCO.

The Summit was also historic in the expansion of the mission of the SCO from Eurasia-wide security to Eurasia-wide economic and financial management.  In his speech to the assembled guests, President Xi mentioned plans to create an SCO Development Bank and trade issues predominated in the one-on-one side meetings of participants.  That is all new.  One may compare this with BRICS, but whereas BRICS is global in scope and has some foot draggers at the top, like Brazil and South Africa, the SCO is focused on Eurasia and appears to be able to act more quickly on agreed objectives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

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Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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