 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. The meeting of the eight member Shanghai Cooperation Organization has begun in the Kirgis city of Bishkek. To talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Prakash. Hello Prabir. Prabir, so this is a meeting of some of the most powerful countries in the region. There's Russia, there's China, there's India and Iran is for instance also an observer state. So what is the relevance of this organization in today's context and how do you see this meeting panning out? I think you have to see the context of what's happening in West Asia and particularly with Iran. That's a very major element of the geo-strategic picture. And obviously Russia and China both have a stake in saying that Iran does not fall under shall we say a regime change attempt, which is what the United States is making. Or if the US goes to war against Iran, then how does the whole region then shape up? This is I think a key issue, particularly as Iran is also a major supplier of natural gas oil to China. So that is one part of the strategic axis shall we say. And the second part of it is of course the Trump's trade war, which is affecting both China and the trade war and sanctions are hurting Iran as well as Russia. So I think this is the core issues that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is really facing up to. So both the geo-strategic and the trade aspects of it. And of course the background of this is the fact that China is the major economic power in the region and its Belt Road Initiative is something which is binding together different countries. In both a trade as well as an infrastructure sharing agreement. Now you know I think also one must distinguish between how the Belt Road Initiative which is relatively more land based than ocean based and the global trading regime which is much more ocean based today operates. In an ocean based system nobody can actually stop the trade from taking place because you are going through open seas. The open seas agreement also ensures that nobody can really stop the ships from going from one country to another. As long as there are seaports available. But when you come to roads then trade is really a cooperative arrangement. It is not a competitive arrangement like ocean trade and a cooperative arrangement means that everybody has to work together and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization therefore in that sense is different from say NATO, Seattle and other kind of organization that we have seen which are military agreements or the World Trade Organization which was everybody coming together to say what we will do of course currently it is a doldrums. But the Belt Road Initiative is actually has to be a cooperative arrangement because land routes, land trade means that every country has to cooperate. Otherwise the trade freezes. It is not that China trade to Iran for instance to a Belt Road Initiative can take place without a corridor and that corridor has to stretch across a number of countries. It could be for instance the corridor that is through Pakistan and then go to the Karachi port and then go to Iran it could be even the Chabahar port. So all of this means that these kind of things the Chabahar port to the Iranian port which is actually at the moment being built by India. So all of these mean that the cooperative arrangement becomes far more important than earlier ocean trade and therefore Shanghai Cooperation also has that strong element in it. And it's also interesting because on the one hand most of the members are countries which are in various ways they have the active part of the Belt Road Initiative and China and Russia have also recently on a variety of global issues built a very working understanding. India is a bit of an outlier here because it has been pushing the US agenda. It has accepted a lot of the US understanding of how the world should be. So what exactly is India's place in this context right now especially considering it's also had issues with the Belt Road Initiative. See India has always had a very shall we say Pakistan centric international diplomacy. So it has not been so much centered around its own self interest as much as isolating Pakistan as a main tenet of its foreign policy. So therefore it seems to put on stake relationships with other countries based on their relationship with Pakistan. So that is one element. Take for instance today the Iran issue. Now Iran has tensions with Pakistan. It has had as you know border forays by forces which are inimical to Iran coming from Pakistan but at the same time it maintains a relationship with Pakistan. In this particular case you can see China and Iran have really come together and they in the sidelines of the SEO they have had long chats with each other. Ruhani and she have met and come to certain decisions on how they will behave. So they are actually treating all of this is a far more shall we say diplomatically of a far more sophisticated level that they are not becoming one country centric organizations even if they have conflicts with that country they are able to work out multiple relationships. India on the other hand seems to be far more focused that either you are Pakistan's enemy then you are with me if you are Pakistan's friend then you are my enemy. So this Pakistan centric proposition of the foreign policy establishment which at the moment seems to be driven by the PM and his ideological predisposition also makes India's geostrategic autonomy more difficult. That is why you decide if China is supporting Pakistan on certain issues then it's an enemy country and then how do I come and play my role in SEO. Of course this also means therefore agreeing to some kind of containment of China policy which the United States wants to pursue but after Doklam I think India has backed off from shall we say direct confrontation with China. They have also not agreed now to the Malabar exercises again so it does seem that they are trying to regain a bit of the strategic autonomy visa with the US China axis. So I think there India is not at the moment going whole hog as it seemed to have been doing two three years back some withdrawal from that complete alignment to the United States visa with the South China Sea visa we shall we say the Malabar exercises millet the quad as it is called Japan, Australia, India, the US so all of this there seems to be some backing off on that but the Pakistan centric focus still remains and if you see the Indian press the entire thing about Shanghai Cooperation Organization is essentially about Pakistan and what China has undertaken or given undertakings visa with Pakistan as we all know China is going to say yes we are against terrorism in the region they're also affected by it as we know the Uighur issue is there very much in China they do face Islamic sectarian politics there and as we know Pakistan has been at once upon a time the center of all of these activities so it's not that they're kind about these things at the same time they're dealing with these issues from the more shall we say pragmatic issues of trade relationships and so on so China is not going to support Pakistan in its shall we say extra territorial ambitions through armed militants or armed terrorist groups at the same time it is not going to abandon Pakistan because of India's insistence that if unless you isolate Pakistan completely then somehow you are violating certain tenets of international policy I think India's lack of sophistication vis-a-vis the Pakistan-China relationship is going to be a problem but China has been very clear SEO is not for use against any country it's for cooperation and they have said they want to strengthen the relationship with India economic ties with India but they have also said that they obviously will continue their bilateral relationship with other countries and I don't think SEO is going to intervene the bilateral relationship between China and Pakistan so I think that is much more for domestic consumption that Modi spoke hard with Xi and made China say ABCD they had conceded when they declared Masood Azhar as a terrorist as you know the US demanded a 2,000-3,000 crore quote-unquote concession because they had declared him the terrorist vis-a-vis their economic ties so all of this China has been relatively more shall we say flexible while India seems to have put almost all their geostrategic eggs in the Pakistan basket so all the saber-attling by the press about this being a key moment is just like you said for domestic consumption well it appears so because I'm reading the Chinese press there is no mention of this key moment and what they had to do they have already done as we had said at the time declaring one person as a terrorist and earlier also people have been classified as terrorists Daoud being one of them and it doesn't really change substantially things on the ground and I don't think looking at the Kashmir problem as just a foreign problem and not a homegrown problem also doesn't help us much so this declaration of terrorist or otherwise Pakistan support to terror and what China is doing all of this is more an externalization of internal problems at the moment rather than external problems because what we can see Kashmir is at the moment not something which has been manufactured purely by Pakistan it is true earlier there was a lot of support to terrorist infiltration across the border a lot of them either India successfully stopped or has dropped this is what the assessment of intelligence agencies from other people who have retired tell us so given that focusing it as only an external problem is to actually hide from the real issues but internally the policies that Indian state is following vis-a-vis minorities and vis-a-vis Kashmir is going to be a long-term problem for it and externalizing it completely in this fashion doesn't really will not serve the Indian state well and finally like you said this is happening in the middle of the US-China trade war so what possibilities does the Belt Road initiative and others and for instance the SCO as a whole actually have in giving China some amount of leverage so to speak in actually in dealing with the trade war you see the Belt Road initiative and the trade issues coming out of it are relatively far slower in the way they will develop and they don't really address any of the issues coming out to the United States because United States was still a $500 billion market for China of course a lot of the $500 billion was also not value addition it was a factory price that we talk about for instance Apple has a huge amount of imports apparently from Boxconn China but what the Chinese value addition is only $8.5 after $237 so this looking at the $500 billion is misleading I think there you have a much more short term war that is going taking place and that is not going to be addressed by the longer term Belt Road initiative I think that has to be really discussed in terms of what's going to be happening to the global trade regime that these are all outside WTO the use of United States of what is called the nuclear option in WTO the defense and security issues if you raise it trumps other things but if it is used for really trade balance then obviously it has huge implications for the trading regime so I think all of that taken together the real issue vis-a-vis US and China is not going to be addressed right over the Belt Road initiative I think that is going to play out in the next 20, 15, 20, 30 years Thank you Praveen That's all we have time for today Keep watching NewsClick