By Ankit Panda
India and Pakistan will join the SCO, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the SCO will start to matter more in Asia.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif are headed to Ufa, Russia later this week where they will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit. Both India and Pakistan are set to join the organization as full members after years of holding observer status. Their accession is expected to conclude in 2016, according to statements by a Russian official. The SCO was founded in 1996 and is largely a forum for limited consultation and cooperation on political, economic, and military matters.
According to the Press Trust of India, the two prime ministers will meet on the sidelines of the summit on July 10. Modi’s talks with Sharif will be an important litmus test for the state of India-Pakistan relations, which have declined in recent months due to a range of factors, including skirmishes across the Line of Control in Kashmir and Pakistan’s treatment of anti-India terrorists.
As my colleague Catherine Putz recently detailed in our Central Asia pages, Modi is on a eight-day, six-nation tour of Central Asia and Russia, with plans to attend the combined BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa from July 8 to 10. Modi’s meeting with Sharif at the SCO summit was expected for some time but was only recently confirmed. Modi and Sharif spoke most recently at the commencement of Ramadan when the Indian prime minister called his Pakistani counterpart. Before then, Sharif and Modi last met in Kathmandu for the 18th SAARC Summit–though they didn’t hold an official bilateral meeting. Last May, shortly after Modi’s inauguration as India’s prime minister, it appeared that the two leaders would establish a positive personal rapport after a series of photo ops and candid personal exchanges but, as in the past, trouble along the border and other issues reverted India and Pakistan to their normal state of mutual suspicion and rivalry.
Read the full story at The Diplomat