Modi’s Tightrope Walk on Belt and Road
One reason why China chose to host the June 9 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Qingdao, a picturesque port of colonial-era buildings and perfectly manicured gardens, is that it is a key stop on Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Eurasia is the heart of the BRI, so for Xi, hosting the SCO in Qingdao was an important platform to push his pet initiative.
The Qingdao summit, however, also happened to be the first of the China and Russia backed grouping to be attended by India as a full member. India and Pakistan were formally included into the six-country grouping, which also includes Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, last year.
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this presented a difficult diplomatic balancing act, of conveying India’s vision for the region despite its stated reservations about the BRI.
The prime minister appeared to pull it off. In his address to the SCO—he was the first leader to speak following host Xi’s opening address— Modi offered India’s vision of connectivity, which was, in some respects, at odds with that of China.
In Xi’s presence, Modi said that “connectivity with SCO and neighbours is a priority for India” but added that India “welcomes new connectivity projects that are inclusive, sustainable, transparent and those that respect sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations”. India has previously expressed concerns on the BRI’s lack of transparency and about the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that passes through Pakistanoccupied Kashmir.
India also stuck firmly to its stand in the official 17-page Qingdao Declaration, issued in Chinese and Russian, the SCO’s two working languages (one immediate area of commonality India and Pakistan stumbled upon was their wish to add English as a third language).
In the one paragraph on the BRI, instead of declaring the consensus position of all SCO “member states” as elsewhere in the document, the
declaration only named the SCO’s six members—Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—but not India, acknowledging its stand on the China-led project. China, at the same time, managed to ensure BRI was mentioned in the statement—as one official put it, a pragmatic compromise.
“We presented nuanced support for regional connectivity,” said Ashok Kantha, former Indian envoy to China and director, Institute for Chinese Studies, Delhi.
At the same time, Kantha says, there is a sense that India and China are looking at focusing more on areas of convergence than divergence.
This was the message Modi and Xi emphasised in their hour-long bilateral meeting in Qingdao, where both shared “a positive assessment” of where relations stood a little more than a month after their April 28 ‘informal summit’ in Wuhan.
Taking forward the ‘Wuhan consensus’, both confirmed an ambitious blueprint for ties in the coming year, with their foreign ministers, defence ministers, national security advisors and home ministers set to meet in the coming months. A first-ever joint “capacity building” project in Afghanistan, notwithstanding their BRI differences, will be launched soon. Both sides also signed two bilateral pacts on continuing the sharing of hydrological data on the Brahmaputra—which China stopped last year— and on expanding non-basmati rice exports to China.
Xi said he would happily accept an invitation from Prime Minister Modi to hold a second ‘informal’ summit in India, likely to be in early 2019. Wuhan, he said, was “a new starting point”. The ups and downs of India-China relations, no doubt, have seen many such new beginnings. Can Modi and Xi avoid the same endings?