When the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) admitted India and Pakistan simultaneously at its June 2017 Astana summit, the official narrative was institutional maturity – a body confident enough to expand. A closer reading of what each founding power stood to gain suggests something layered. The two admissions fit the interests of Moscow and Beijing so differently, and so conversely, that the symmetry of the outcome looks less like convergence than like mutual concession: each power accepting what the other wanted, in exchange for getting what it wanted in return. No diplomatic record confirms this was explicit bargaining. But the structural logic is difficult to dismiss, and it illuminates the SCO’s internal fractures more clearly than any joint communication released.

Russia’s Calculus: Dilution as Strategy

The SCO was founded in 2001 to manage post-Soviet border anxieties and the Central Asian security scenario. Russia was its natural co-architect. But through the 2010s, the organisation’s economic centre of gravity gradually migrated toward Beijing. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, poured infrastructure financing into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan at a scale Moscow could not match. Russia was watching its near-abroad become China’s economic hinterland.

Read against that backdrop, Russia’s long-standing advocacy for India’s SCO membership has a discernible logic. India’s entry would not function as a direct counterweight to China – too blunt an instrument in a consensus-based body, but as a complicating variable. More voices meant more friction, and India’s well-documented resistance to Chinese-led multilateral frameworks could produce exactly the institutional drag Moscow needed. Whether or not Moscow calculated this consciously, but the fact stands clear – when you cannot dominate the institution’s agenda, you change the membership in order to align the outcome with its interests.

China’s Counter: A Veto Dressed as Generosity

Beijing’s agreement to India’s admission was, by all available evidence, conditional. The insistence on Pakistan’s simultaneous entry is most coherently read as China’s structural answer to the problem Russia was trying to create. Andrew Small’s detailed account of the China-Pakistan relationship establishes that Islamabad functions as a consistent amplifier of Chinese positions across multilateral forums: reliable on BRI language, reliable on terrorism framings that shield certain actors, reliable as a bloc vote when Chinese interests face pushback. Bringing Pakistan into the SCO ensured that India could not build coalitions around positions hostile to Beijing.

The result suits China well. India’s disruptive potential is offset by Pakistan’s presence, and the SCO’s consensus-based decision-making converts India’s objections into paralysis rather than redirection. India has refused to endorse BRI-related language in joint statements consistently since 2017. It can block, but it cannot steer. That asymmetry is, from Beijing’s perspective, an acceptable price for India’s membership.

Pakistan’s entry: Trojan membership and SCO’s paralysis

Pakistan’s inclusion in the SCO has produced consequences that extend beyond China’s immediate institutional calculus. As an SCO member, Pakistan gains a multilateral platform within which to internationalise its disputes with India: framing Kashmir, cross-border terrorism designations along with bilateral tensions within a forum where Chinese backing is structurally assured and the consensus requirements providing Islamabad an effective veto-power over joint declarations. This has negatively impacted the SCO’s counterterrorism mandate in a quite evident manner. The organisation’s Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), originally designed to coordinate responses to militancy and terrorism across Central Asia, has been rendered largely inoperative on matters touching the Afghan-Pakistan theatre – precisely because the Indian and Pakistani positions are irreconcilable and China’s interest favour ambiguity.

The result is an organisation with a counterterrorism mandate that is not being exercised in the region where it matters the most. Broadly speaking, Pakistan’s presence ensures that the South Asian bilateral tensions remain permanently embedded in a body designed for Central Asian security – a factor which suits China, complicates India’s stances in the group and neither serves the Central Asian members nor the organisation’s founding purpose.

Central Asia: Where the Real Contest Lives

The SCO’s founding geography – Central Asia, is where the Russia-China relationship is actually being tested, away from summit communications. Moscow’s claim to primacy rests on historical and institutional ties: the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), and decades of military relationships. China’s competing claim rests on something more durable in the short term: capital. Beijing has become the dominant economic partner across the region while carefully avoiding the language of hegemony. The SCO, originally a framework within which Moscow could shape regional norms, has become an arena in which China sets the economic agenda while Russia manages the security perimeter. It is a division of labour that suits Beijing and discomfits Moscow. Russia’s push for SCO expansion was, among other things, an attempt to change the terms of that contest by changing the organisation’s membership.

India’s Opening: Minerals and the Limits of Ambivalence

India’s relationship with the SCO since 2017 has been one of studied ambivalence – bilateral engagements on the margins, principled opposition to BRI language, modest institutional investment. The question Indian strategists should be pressing harder is not whether the SCO is frustrating, but what it makes accessible that nothing else does.

Central Asia holds one of the world’s most significant concentrations of critical minerals. Kazakhstan has substantial uranium and rare earth reserves. Uzbekistan holds tungsten, molybdenum, and gold. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan carry untapped lithium potential. For an India scaling renewable energy capacity, building a domestic semiconductor base, and actively seeking to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains, these are not peripheral resources. China has used BRI to embed itself in Central Asian mineral extraction through infrastructure financing that creates long-term dependency. India cannot match that capital. But the Central Asian republics are not passive; many of them have quietly sought to diversify partnerships precisely to reduce the leverage Beijing has accumulated. India – a large, growing market that arrives without BRI’s geopolitical strings is a credible alternative. The SCO is the most direct institutional channel through which that alternative can be made concrete.

Conclusion

If the structural reading advanced here holds, then Russia got what it wanted and China got what it wanted, and the organisation that resulted from their bargain is less a functional security body than a holding chamber for Asia’s unresolved rivalries: structurally incapable of decisive collective action, populated by powers whose bilateral frictions exceed their multilateral convergences.

However for India, the calculus is neither dismissal nor enthusiasm. SCO membership carries costs: diplomatic association with Russia in a post-Ukraine world, institutional paralysis courtesy of Pakistan, and the risk of legitimising a China-shaped multilateral order. At the same time, SCO also carries an underutilised asset – structured access to Central Asian states whose mineral wealth is directly relevant to India’s strategic ambitions, and who have their own reasons to want India more present. The error is treating SCO membership as a prestige question or a liability to be managed, rather than as a platform with a specific, concrete use. That use is Central Asia. India should pursue her objectives with the deliberateness the opportunity warrants, not as a burden for Moscow’s anxieties, nor as a counterweight Beijing has already discounted, but as a serious economic partner for states that are, themselves, looking for one.