Why Modi Visits a Shastri Memorial Before Talking Trade in Tashkent

What Each Player at This Summit Is Actually Calculating Start with

what India is not doing on this trip: it is not choosing continental Eurasia over its Indo-Pacific maritime alignments. It is doing both, simultaneously and the SCO is precisely the venue that lets it. Understanding why requires modelling what India, China, Russia and the Central Asian hosts each want from this summit - because the joint statements will tell you almost none of it directly.

India's Calculation: A Continental Seat Without a Continental Commitment

India's interest in the SCO has never been about choosing Eurasia over the Quad. It is about not being locked out of a bloc where China and Russia set much of the regional security and connectivity agenda, particularly on Afghanistan-linked counter-terrorism through the SCO's Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure.

Full membership since 2017 gives India a seat at that table without requiring it to abandon its separate Indo-Pacific commitments - a genuine multi-alignment strategy, not indecision. The Uzbekistan leg, with its emphasis on trade, digital connectivity and energy, is India's attempt to build direct bilateral ballast in Central Asia so its SCO presence isn't purely reactive to a China-Russia agenda.

China and Russia's Calculation: A Forum They Still Largely Set the Terms For For China, the

SCO's value lies in normalising its economic and infrastructural centrality across Central Asia without triggering the pushback a purely bilateral approach might invite - multilateralism dilutes scrutiny of what is, in practice, often bilateral leverage.

For Russia, weakened bilaterally in parts of Central Asia since 2022, the SCO offers a forum where its voice still carries institutional weight even as its bilateral influence in the region has been quietly eroding. Neither power particularly wants India's growing bilateral footprint in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to translate into a stronger Indian voice inside the SCO itself - which is exactly why India is doing the bilateral relationship-building work in Tashkent first, before arriving in Bishkek.

Why the Shastri Memorial Visit Is Not Sentiment

The stop at the Shastri Memorial and the Mahatma Gandhi Centre is not incidental scheduling - it is India doing the one thing China and Russia's infrastructure-and-security offers cannot easily replicate: a six-decade-old historical claim to Tashkent as a place where Indian diplomacy already mattered, predating either country's current Central Asian push.

Soft power here is doing hard strategic work, reminding both the host and the region that India's presence in Central Asia is not a recent hedge but a resumed relationship. The angle worth holding onto for the exam: India's SCO membership is not a contradiction of its Indo-Pacific alignment and reading it as one misses how deliberately India is running two tracks - continental engagement through the SCO, maritime engagement through the Quad - precisely because neither China nor Russia can easily force India to choose only one.