THE recent virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Moscow, which brought together top Chinese, Indian and Russian leaders face-to-face, could hardly respond to the emerging global situation in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory in the US elections.
The summit — also held amid the pandemic, heightened India-China tensions, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and turmoil in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan — entailed some outcomes.
China and Russia tacitly remained silent over Biden’s victory as they rolled out a post-Trump era plan to stick to multilateralism and stay united amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
President Xi Jinping had to vent out why the world needs China for prosperity as he called for an end to politicising the pandemic — a view endorsed by Putin as well.
The single most important outcome of the summit was a decision to collectively mitigate the impact of the pandemic, sharing of vaccines among SCO states along with jointly speeding up economic recovery.
Incidentally, both PM Modi and President Xi in their speeches shared an identical view on the unique value of traditional medicine in the battle against Covid-19 — hence the need for learning from each other.
It was out-of-their-way to discuss the border tensions. Both leaders in their address made some conciliatory remarks, with President Xi calling for “resolving disputes and differences through dialogue and consultations” as he went on to add, “history has proven, and will continue to prove that good neighbourliness will prevail over a beggar-thy-neighbour approach, mutually beneficial cooperation will replace a zero-sum game, and multilateralism will win over unilateralism.”Read more…