With China and Pakistan as co-members, is the SCO a platform of opportunity or constraint for India's Eurasian strategy? Analyse.

India became a full SCO member together with Pakistan at Astana in 2017. China, India's main strategic rival, is also a member [1]. For India's Eurasian strategy, the SCO is both an opportunity and a constraint. It works best as a forum for engagement, not for enforcement.

Opportunity: why the SCO matters to India

• Access to Central Asia: India gets regular meetings with Central Asian states and Russia. At Qingdao, Rajnath Singh held talks with his Belarusian, Tajik and Kazakh counterparts [8].
• A channel to China: India and China have used the SCO's sidelines for defence talks. Singh met Adm. Dong Jun at Qingdao (2025) and Bishkek (2026) [6].
• A platform for India's terror narrative: India has framed terrorism as the "gravest threat" (2021) [2]. As chair in 2023, it asked members to "fix accountability" on supporters [3]. It now calls for dismantling the "entire ecosystem" of terrorism, with Pakistan's Deputy PM in the room [7].
• Institutional tools: RATS (Tashkent) lets members share counter-terror intelligence [1].
• Economic agenda: India backed an SCO action plan for multilateral trade and called for resilient supply chains [7].

Constraint: the co-member problem

• Consensus rule: SCO texts need every member to agree. So the state accused of cross-border terrorism can weaken the wording.
• Pakistan: Singh has criticised countries that use cross-border terrorism as an "instrument of policy" [4]. Even so, India cannot name Pakistan in SCO texts, so its language stays general.
• China: Beijing hosts the Secretariat and shapes the agenda [1]. Its support for Pakistan limits what RATS can do in practice.
• Little visible result: At Bishkek, India again rejected "double standards" [5]. The demand has been repeated for years, but no SCO action against safe-haven states has followed.

Assessment Overall, the opportunity outweighs the constraint. The SCO gives India a Eurasian presence, contact with China and a seat where texts are drafted. Leaving would let others write the SCO's narrative. However, the actual punishment of terror financing has to happen in other forums, such as FATF and UNSC listings.

India should stay engaged in the SCO and pursue enforcement elsewhere. It can push general, rule-based wording on terror financing that is harder to veto. It can also deepen Central Asian connectivity and use Singh's call for "dialogue and diplomacy" [5]. This lets India use the SCO as an opportunity without letting its co-members set the limits of its Eurasian strategy.