Prime MinisterNarendra Modiwill host Chinese PresidentXi Jinping, his Russia counterpart Vladimir Putin, Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif and other leaders of theSCOnations at a virtual summit of the bloc on Tuesday that is expected to focus on regional security situation and ways to boost connectivity and trade.
It will be Putin’s first participation in a multilateral summit after a mercenary group launched a short-lived Armed Rebellion last week that rocked Moscow.
The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) under India’s presidency is also set to welcome Iran as the new permanent member of the grouping.
The SCO, comprising India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is an influential economic and security bloc and has emerged as one of the largest transregional .
India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit of SCO on September 16 last year.
Heads of the two SCO bodies — the secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) are also set to attend Tuesday’s virtual summit whose theme is “Towards a SECURE SCO’.
The SECURE acronym was coined by Prime Minister Modi at the 2018 SCO summit and it stands for Security; economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment.
The organisations are the UN, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations),CIS(Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia).
The SCO was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan became its permanent member along with India in 2017.