Modi leaves for Tashkent and the SCO summit with terrorism and a Putin meeting on the slate

Prime Minister Narendra Modi left New Delhi on Saturday for a four-day trip that starts with a state visit to Tashkent and ends at the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek. In a departure statement he said he wanted to advance India's SCO agenda of security, connectivity and opportunity and to work with other members for a region free of terrorism, separatism and extremism.

The Tashkent leg, on 29 and 30 August, is his fourth visit to Uzbekistan and follows an invitation from President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The two governments call the relationship a strategic partnership. Officials listed trade and investment, defence, digital connectivity, energy, education and people-to-people work as the file for delegation talks. Both sides intend to place those talks against two domestic plans: Viksit Bharat 2047 and Uzbekistan 2030.

Modi will visit the Lal Bahadur Shastri memorial in Tashkent and the Mahatma Gandhi Centre at the Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies. Shastri died in the city in 1966 after signing the Tashkent Declaration with Pakistan. The memorial visit is a fixed piece of Indian itineraries there. It also gives the trip a historical hook that is not about the SCO table.

What Bishkek is for

From Tashkent Modi flies to the Kyrgyz capital at the invitation of President Sadyr Zhaparov. The summit marks 25 years of the SCO. India has been a full member since 2017. The grouping now has ten members, including China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus and the Central Asian states. Putin and Xi Jinping are expected. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov has already said Putin will see Xi first on 31 August and Modi after that, with a further India-Russia meeting listed for the BRICS gathering in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September.

ANI reported that Modi will meet Putin on 31 August in Bishkek. The two sides are due to review the wider relationship, including energy and defence supplies that have grown since 2022. For New Delhi the SCO floor is also the place where China and Pakistan sit in the same room. Modi's public language on Saturday put terrorism at the front of that room.

He will hold a separate meeting with Zhaparov and attend the opening of the sixth World Nomad Games. Those events are Kyrgyz host duties. They also give bilateral time that does not have to be spent on the communique.

The narrower Indian interest

Central Asia sits on the other side of Afghanistan and on the land routes India cannot use through Pakistan. Uzbekistan is a market and a defence partner. Kyrgyzstan holds the chair this year. A four-day circuit that combines a state visit, a 25th-anniversary summit and a games opening is how New Delhi keeps a seat in a forum it did not found and cannot dominate.

The risk on this trip is not protocol. It is the gap between the language of connectivity and the facts of blocked roads, delayed customs and a neighbourhood war. Modi's Saturday sentence about a region free of terrorism is the line he will be measured against when the Bishkek declaration is issued and when he sits down with Putin the same day Xi does.