The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin offered no dramatic breakthroughs for India, but it did highlight the tightrope Delhi continues to walk between Eurasian symbolism and Indo-Pacific substance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in seven years underscored the need to keep channels open with Beijing and Moscow, yet it also reminded that India’s foreign policy is not about choosing sides but about preserving room for manoeuvre. Strategic autonomy — India’s guiding compass since independence — has acquired renewed salience in a world fractured by U.S.–China rivalry, Russia’s dependence on Beijing, and the contest for influence across Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, his first trip to China in seven years, the choreography was carefully managed. Images of Modi seated alongside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were designed to convey a sense of multipolar solidarity, a Eurasian counterweight to Western power. Xi spoke of the “dragon and the elephant walking together", and Moscow projected the summit as proof that it was not isolated despite sanctions. For Beijing and Moscow, the SCO is a theatre of defiance. For India, however, the calculus is more complicated.

Unlike China and Russia, India does not approach the SCO as a platform to challenge the West. It treats the grouping as a regional mechanism for dialogue, a venue for projecting presence in Central Asia, and an opportunity to ensure it is not excluded from conversations shaping Eurasia. But this participation comes with inherent limits. The SCO has steadily tilted towards China’s vision, whether on infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) or on security issues where Beijing shields Pakistan. India has consistently refused to endorse the BRI, rejected equivocations on terrorism, and kept its emphasis on sovereignty intact. These are not cosmetic differences but reflections of India’s refusal to be co-opted into another power’s project.

India’s approach to the SCO reflects a deeper principle that has defined its foreign policy since independence: strategic autonomy. Often misunderstood as equidistance or non-alignment by another name, strategic autonomy is not about sitting on the fence. It is about retaining decision-making flexibility, maximising space for........

© News18