‘SCO summit 2025 jeopardized by India’s missteps’

This is apropos to letters to the Editor titled above carried by the newspaper on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and yesterday.

The SCO must now confront difficult questions about its own structure, leadership, and objectives. If the organization is to remain relevant, it needs internal checks and balances to prevent any single member from jeopardizing its collective agenda.

Its focus must return to economic integration, infrastructure development, and multilateral coordination in response to Western sanctions and financial coercion. Disputes between members should be addressed diplomatically and privately, ensuring that the organization presents a united front on critical issues like trade, security, and sovereignty.

The SCO Summit 2025 was a rare moment when emerging powers had the chance to reshape the balance of global power and demonstrate Asia’s capacity to define its own future. Representing over 3 billion people, the organisation had the influence and authority to strengthen regional integration, reduce dependency on Western systems, and challenge global inequities. But instead of a historic breakthrough, the summit exposed the vulnerability of an organization undermined from within.

By pursuing narrow domestic political agendas in an international forum, Prime Minister Modi not only weakened India’s standing but also jeopardized the SCO’s ability to act as a credible counterweight to Western power. Concluding, at a time when the world faces escalating conflicts, economic fragmentation, and deepening humanitarian crises, Asia needed leadership, vision, and unity.

What it received instead was division, distraction, and paralysis. Unless the SCO learns from this failure and reforms itself to ensure collective purpose and discipline, it risks becoming yet another fractured body—unable to defend the interests of its members and irrelevant in shaping the new world order.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025