The way business was conducted, or not conducted at the recent Goa ministerial meeting – and more so on the sidelines, which caught the media and national attention better – the question is if the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is going the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) way. Inherent India-Pakistan differences that have nothing to do with regional cooperation torpedoed SAARC from within. In the case of SCO, China and Pakistan, as was to be expected, have joined hands against India, with Russia, owing to the Ukraine War, may be sitting on the fence, just now.

At the end of the SCO ministerial meeting in Goa, India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar, ticked off the two over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that passes through Pak-occupied Kashmir (PoK).In a pointed reference to Pakistan, he also said that ‘victims of terrorism do not sit with perpetrators of terrorism’.

With these realistic, yet caustic observations, Jaishankar put paid to what was in store. Just a day later in Islamabad, the foreign ministers of Pakistan and China, Bilawal Bhutto and Qin Gang pledged to revive the CPEC. It could well set the tone for the revival of China’s more-than-ambitious Belt and Road Initiative that had fallen into bad times during the Covid pandemic.

The two nations would have said and done precisely as much even without it. But Jaishankar’s statements in Goa made it look as if Beijing and Islamabad were thumbing their nose at India, as if their ‘response’ was an after-thought.

Jaishankar per se cannot be blamed for what he said at the post-meet news conference in Goa. On the sidelines of the SCO meeting, he met separately with China’s Qin Gang, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov and counterparts from other member-nations, barring Pakistan’s Bhutto. It had more to do with the state of bilateral relations but in contemporary reality, India-China relations should have been worse than India-Pakistan relations, barring of course, Bhutto’s coarse and uncivil language of the past months. It’s not so, it would seem, post-Goa.

Jaishankar’s bilateral talks with Qin Gang and defence minister Rajnath Singh’s Delhi discussions with counterpart Li Shangfu clearly brought out the unmatched post-Galwan Indian expectations from China on the LAC in particular. Nearer home and abroad – and even in a lesser-known Dominican Republic a week earlier – Jaishankar described India-China relations as ‘abnormal’. After the Goa bilateral, he tweeted that the ‘focus’ of bilateral talks ‘remains on … ensuring peace and tranquillity in the border areas’.

At the Rajnath-Li talks, India reiterated one more time that bilateral relations cannot be ‘normal’ unless there is peace in the border areas. Li later said that the border situation was ‘generally stable’ without explaining what he had in mind. One thing is to refer to non-repetition of Galwan-like episodes. The other is the decision of the corps commanders to stay in close touch and work out a mutually-acceptable solution to the remaining issues in eastern Ladakh at the earliest. Yet another is to imply a ‘new normal’ along the LAC for China to start-off future LAC talks from the present ground situation. It is just not acceptable to India.

At the Islamabad bilateral, Bilawal Bhutto recorded how “we deeply appreciate China’s firm support for Pakistan’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and national development as well as China’s principled and just stance on the Jammu and Kashmir dispute”. India had declined Beijing’s invitation for the BRI inauguration mainly because CPEC passed through PoK, which is Indian territory, after all.

Jaishankar reiterated as much at Goa: “On the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, I think it was made very clear, not once but twice in the SCO meeting, that connectivity is good for progress, but connectivity cannot violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity.” It is unclear who projected CPEC as an intra-SCO connectivity project. However, Jaishankar’s statement at the ministerial meeting is believed to have been made in response to some such claim (possibly by China).

Either way, other members of the SCO should see it all as a potential threat to the existence of one of the few multilateral organisations uninfluenced by the West, another being the BRICS. Russia at the moment is in no position or mood to ensure that SCO does not end up as a permanent venue for a slanging match among India and its twin adversaries working in tandem.

It should however be alive to the reality that just as Moscow does not want Ukraine War discussed in the UN and other international fora, issues hurting individual SCO members should be kept away from the forum. China, for instance, cannot be allowed to camouflage border politics as an SCO developmental agenda, which it is not. In the absence of a nation like Russia to moderate intra-SCO national behaviour, Beijing itself should decide if it wants the organisation continued in this form and format, or wants it to go back into the shell from which it broke out long ago.

Looked at from the long-standing bilateral relations, especially against common adversary India, China could not but have said things that Pakistan wants to hear, especially after India’s snub at Goa. But going beyond, it is China’s belief that India-China and India-Pakistan border disputes cannot reach finality without either or both pairs discussing the ‘Aksai Chin issue’.

It is about the Pakistan-occupied Indian territory in erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir, now trifurcated under the Indian Constitution since. Islamabad gifted it away to Beijing, on the specious plea that historically the area had belonged to China. Even so, Pakistan cannot rob Peter and pay Paul – rather, gifting Paul.

Bilawal’s bad-mouthing of India is a biological problem genetically inherited from his maternal grandfather, Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto. Like all Pakistan leaders, including those that aspire to fast-track their electoral ascendancy to the prime minister’s job, together have made India-bashing central to Pakistan’s national identity and agenda. The nation has paid too high a price for such behaviour, as the present economic crisis has proved one more time.

Pakistan is facing National Assembly elections later this year. Clearly, Bilawal’s attacks on India, from inside his country and outside, have to be seen in this context. Not only India, but also third nations, whose hospitality he often misuses to target New Delhi and Prime Minister Modi, as if to try and wreck the excellent bilateral relations between the other two. It has not worked thus far.

India also has to calibrate its posturing against Pakistan. Independent of Bilawal kind of unjustified and abrasive criticisms, there is a genuine love and respect for India inside Pakistan just now. Ordinary Pakistanis are said to be awed at the progress made by India since Independence, while the elite section of the nation’s population express them in words, in the print, television and social media.

It is a moment for India to capture, not let it slip away as New Delhi cannot be seen as hurting the national pride of those segments. Without Indian efforts, they may have emerged as India’s ‘soft-power’ in Pakistan. Wait-and-watch should be India’s approach to Pakistan just now, letting the nation’s voters to decide if they still want someone like Bilawal Bhutto to be their prime minister, now or later – or, want him in national politics, at all.