Examine how India's SCO membership shapes its engagement with Central Asian states, given the region's proximity to both Russia and China.

India became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2017 [1], gaining the only standing multilateral table where it sits with all five Central Asian republics alongside Russia and China. The membership widens India's access to its "extended neighbourhood", but also caps how far it can shape the regional agenda.

SCO as an enabler of access

• Summit diplomacy: SCO Heads of State meetings double as bilateral windows — Samarkand (2022) and Astana (2024), where India–Uzbekistan Foreign Ministers met on the sidelines [4]; the 2026 Bishkek summit continues this pattern.
• Security convergence: counter-terrorism and radicalisation, sharpened by the 2024 Moscow attack and instability spilling from Afghanistan, are shared priorities that SCO institutionalises through its security machinery [1].
• Legitimacy without contiguity: lacking a land border with the region, India gains a permanent, rules-based seat rather than episodic outreach.

Constraints imposed by the Russia–China proximity

• SCO works by consensus, and China's economic weight plus Russia's historic leverage dilute India's preferred formulations, especially on connectivity and cross-border terrorism.
• China's Belt and Road footprint already dominates regional infrastructure; SCO offers India no comparable financing instrument.
• The forum cannot solve India's core physical access problem — Pakistan blocks overland transit, making Chabahar and the INSTC indispensable supplements.
• Divergent national postures, such as Turkmenistan's declared neutrality, further limit bloc-wide bargaining.

SCO as complement, not substitute

• The "Connect Central Asia" Policy supplies the bilateral political, security, energy and cultural pillars SCO does not [2].
• The India–Central Asia Summit, launched on 27 January 2022 and institutionalised biennially, gives India an exclusive leaders'-level platform free of great-power presence [3].

SCO thus offers India presence and process, while the region's dependence on Moscow and Beijing limits its influence. The realistic course is to use SCO for security and visibility, while investing in connectivity corridors and the India–Central Asia Summit — building a distinctive, development-led partnership consistent with India's sovereignty-respecting neighbourhood approach.