Modi begins a four-day trip to Tashkent and the SCO in Bishkek

Prime Minister Narendra Modi begins a four-day Central Asia visit on Saturday, 29 August, with a state trip to Tashkent followed by the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek. The Ministry of External Affairs set the calendar last week. Uzbekistan is 29 and 30 August. Kyrgyzstan is 31 August and 1 September.

The Tashkent leg is Modi’s fourth visit to the country and his second bilateral one. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev issued the invitation. Delegation-level talks are listed against trade and investment, defence, critical minerals, energy, digital connectivity, healthcare, education, technology and people-to-people work. The two governments want those files read against Viksit Bharat 2047 and Uzbekistan-2030, the domestic plans each side uses as a long-term script. Modi is also expected at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial in Tashkent and at the Mahatma Gandhi Centre in the Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies. Shastri died in the city in January 1966 after signing the Tashkent Declaration with Pakistan. The memorial stop is a fixed part of Indian visits for that reason.

From Tashkent he flies to Bishkek at the invitation of President Sadyr Japarov. The SCO summit this year marks 25 years since the organisation was founded and nine years since India became a full member in 2017. MEA Secretary (West) Sibi George said Modi will speak on three headings the government has used for the forum: security, connectivity and opportunity. Bilateral meetings on the margins are expected with several SCO leaders. Officials have said Russian President Vladimir Putin is on that list. Modi is also due at the opening of the sixth World Nomad Games, a Central Asian sports and culture meeting that Kyrgyzstan is hosting around the summit dates.

The trip sits between two other India-chaired gatherings. India holds the BRICS chair for 2026 and will host leaders in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. The SCO week is the last major multilateral stop before that summit. It is also a chance to talk to Moscow and Beijing in the same city without a Western caucus in the room. India has used that geometry before: keep the Russia defence and energy channel open, keep a working line with China after the 25th round of Special Representatives talks on the Line of Actual Control in Beijing this week, and still buy weapons and technology from the United States, as it did on Friday with the Javelin letter of offer and acceptance.

Trade is the quieter file. India-Uzbekistan turnover remains small against the language of a strategic partnership signed in 2011. Critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, defence training and a planned push on digital public infrastructure are the items officials name when asked what “bolster” means in a joint statement. Connectivity talk will run into geography. Goods moving between India and Central Asia still depend on routes through Iran or through Russia, both of them under strain from the six-month Iran war and from Western sanctions. A summit speech will not open a new corridor. It can record that India wants one.

Putin’s presence on the expected bilateral list will be read in Washington and in Kyiv as a meeting, not as a lecture. Modi has held that line through the Ukraine war: talk to Russia, buy oil, keep the defence spare-parts chain, and refuse to treat the SCO as a platform for isolating Moscow. The Bishkek calendar now puts that practice next to a 25th-anniversary family photograph of a club that also includes China, Iran and four Central Asian states. The photograph is the easy part. The minerals, the transit routes and the LAC language that comes out of the same week will tell whether the visit moved any file that was stuck when the plane left Delhi.