Can India balance Shanghai Coop with US strategic partnership?
In an intriguing article for the Asia Times online — best known, recently, for murdered Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad — Sreeram Chaulia points out that India's moves to join the Shanghai Cooperation (SCO) may be at odds with its desire to improve ties with the Washington.
Chaulia writes:
If the historic purpose of NATO was to "keep the Germans down, the Americans in and the Russians out", then SCO is at least minimally united around the motto of "keeping the Americans out". India's strategic establishment is contradictorily keen on keeping the Americans in Afghanistan for as long as possible, believing that a US withdrawal would throw open the doors to renewed Pakistani (and indirectly Chinese) hegemony in a geostrategic lynchpin.
The reason India is willing to risk the US partnership is energy:
Still, the consequence of a move by India to a more equidistant position between the United States and SCO members in the new Cold War is a price New Delhi considers worth paying. The SCO has material benefits in store for India, including integration into the about-to-be-launched "energy club" that will facilitate contracts for supply and demand for oil and gas between consumers like China and India and producers like Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (a non-member, but an active participant in SCO's affairs). SCO's general secretary Muratbek Imanaliyev has delineated a practical vision for this "club", viz "satisfying the interests of these two groups."
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