Meanwhile, at the SCO annual summit in Tashkent, India will sign the first Memorandum of Obligations to begin the process of its accession to the grouping as a full-fledged member along with Pakistan.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping this week on the sidelines of a summit in Uzbekistan, the Indian foreign ministry said Wednesday, seeking China’s backing for India’s entry into a nuclear trade group. According to the agenda, the heads of the SCO member states will seek to deepen multi-faceted cooperation, strengthen security in Central Asia, and exchange views on major regional and worldwide issues.
The SCO was founded in Shanghai in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
On whether Modi will have a meeting with Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain, she said India does not even officially know who will represent Pakistan at the summit.
India, Iran and Pakistan were admitted as observers at the 2005 summit.
Mehta said the membership will provide India an opportunity to have extended cooperation with members of the grouping including China and Pakistan.
“The issue of expanding the SCO was decided by the group in 2010”.
As a result, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be holding meetings with the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to lobby for India’s NSG membership.
Cooperation on the part of the security is part of the SCO as India will also be a member of the Regional Ant-Terrorism Structure, she said. It had put in its application in 2014 when SCO started inviting them from new members. “It is really a coincidence that the NSG meeting is happening on the same days as the SCO summit”, Mehta said.
Announcing Prime Minister’s plans at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, Secretary (West) in the MEA Sujata Mehta today confirmed that a bilateral meeting between Mr Modi and Mr Xi was slated for tomorrow evening itself. “A decision on actually expanding the SCO was taken by the SCO in 2014, and in the same year we applied to join it as a member”, Mehta added.
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There was also talk of an SCO energy club and India aims to benefit from it, she said. Apart from China, a handful of others are opposed to the entry of countries like India that aren’t signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) into the group.
