SCO summit in Tashkent opportunity for Modi's bilateral meetings with Sharif, Xi

If Modi holds bilateral meetings with Sharif in Tashkent, it will be the first such engagement between the leaders after a gap of almost seven years

The forthcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at Tashkent in Uzbekistan on September 15 and 16 is likely to offer opportunities for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bilateral meetings with his Chinese and Pakistani counterparts, President Xi Jingping and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, on the sideline of the conclave.

If Modi holds bilateral meetings with Sharif in Tashkent, it will be the first such engagement between the leaders of India and Pakistan after a gap of almost seven years. Modi had last met Sharif’s brother M Nawaz Sharif during his “surprise visit” to Lahore in December 2015 to greet the then Prime Minister of Pakistan on the occasion of his birthday as well as to attend the wedding ceremony of his granddaughter.

If the Prime Minister holds a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, it will be the first such occasion after the military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control between the two nations in eastern Ladakh started in April-May 2020. Modi and Xi had the last bilateral engagement during the second informal summit between the two at a seaside resort at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu in October 2019.

Modi may have these bilateral meetings as India takes over presidency of the Council of Heads of State of the bloc after the summit in Tashkent. PM Modi will host the SCO summit in New Delhi next year.

A source in New Delhi said that the meetings could not be ruled out as the host of the next summit of any plurilateral organisation generally had such engagements with as many leaders of a bloc as possible during the preceding summit. The source, however, also told DH that no such meeting had been finalised yet.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is likely to visit Tashkent to attend the meeting of the SCO foreign ministers hosted by the Uzbek Government on July 28 and 29. He may have a bilateral meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to review the outcome of the recently held 16th round of negotiations between the military commanders of India and China to resolve the stand-off along the LAC in eastern Ladakh. The two ministers also had a meeting on the sideline of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting at Bali in Indonesia on July 7. It was in fact after the Jaishankar-Wang meeting in Bali that the date for the 16th round of negotiations was finalised, but it apparently failed to achieve any immediate breakthrough in ending the more-than-two-year-long stand-off along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

Speculation is also rife about Jaishankar and new Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari having a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the SCO meeting in Tashkent.