New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is reportedly scheduled to conduct a virtual summit on July 4 addressing Chinese President Xi Jinping, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Shehbaz Sharif along with other leaders of the SCO nations. The virtual session is expected to lay emphasis on regional security matters and ways to better connectivity and trade.

Earlier, it was scheduled to happen in-person in New Delhi but the plan switched to virtual at the beginning of June. The much-awaited summit will be commencing on Tuesday at 12.30 pm and will wind up by 3 pm.

Meanwhile, Iran will join/attend the summit as the new permanent member of the grouping.

The Regular meeting of the SCO Foreign Ministers Council happened on May 4 and May 5, 2023, in Goa, which was attended by Pakistan’s Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, China Qin Gang and Russia Sergey Lavrov with others.

An official said that over the past few years, India has played a “very active and constructive role” in all the areas of activities of the SCO.

In September 2022, India was given the presidency of the SCO from Uzbekistan at the Samarkand Summit.

This time the summit will be having discussions on some concerning matters such as the situation in Afghanistan to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Participants of the SCO summit

Heads of the two SCO bodies- the secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-terrorist Structure) are confirmed to attend Tuesday’s virtual summit, This time the theme of the SCO summit is “Towards a SECURE SCO.”

The term SECURE for the theme was coined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2018 SCO summit which is short for Security, Economy, Trade, Connectivity, Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity with Environment.

Invitations have been sent out to the heads of six international and regional organisations.

The heads of the organisations are; the United Nations, 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).

India in the year 2005 started associating with the SCO as an observer country and later became a full member state of SCO at the Astana summit in the year 2017.

(Written by:- Mahek Nigam

Edited By:- Prateek Gautam)