Modi leaves for Tashkent, then the SCO summit in Bishkek

Prime Minister Narendra Modi left New Delhi on Saturday for a four-day visit that begins in Tashkent and ends in Bishkek. The Ministry of External Affairs set the calendar on Friday: a state visit to Uzbekistan on 29 and 30 August at the invitation of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, then the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in the Kyrgyz Republic on 31 August and 1 September at the invitation of President Sadyr Zhaparov. It is Modi’s fourth trip to Uzbekistan.

In a departure statement he said the India-Uzbekistan strategic partnership had moved in recent years and that he would discuss trade and investment, digital connectivity, defence and energy, and the two official development slogans, Viksit Bharat and Yangi Uzbekistan. He will visit the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial in Tashkent and the Mahatma Gandhi Centre at the Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies. More than 16,000 Indian students study in Uzbekistan. Four Indian university campuses operate there. Those numbers, not the memorial stops, are the working baseline for education and mobility talks.

From Tashkent he flies to Bishkek. India joined the SCO in 2017. Modi said he wanted to advance a regional brief of security, connectivity and opportunity and to work with other members against terrorism, separatism and extremism. He is also due at the opening of the sixth World Nomad Games and at bilateral meetings on the summit sidelines. The MEA did not publish a list of those pull-asides before departure.

The timing is tight against the Nepal-Tibet floods. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spent Friday on the Indian missing list and on relief flights into Kathmandu. Modi has already spoken to Nepal’s prime minister. The Central Asia itinerary does not pause for that file, but every SCO communiqué this week will be read in New Delhi for language on disaster coordination and on China, whose Tibetan counties sit at the head of the same river system.

Trade with Uzbekistan is still small against the political investment. Defence training, IT services and pharmaceuticals have grown faster than bulk goods. Mirziyoyev’s government has spent a decade opening the economy after Islam Karimov. Indian firms want a clearer path for rupee settlement, air connectivity and projects that do not have to wait on the stalled north-south corridor through Iran. Those items belong in Saturday’s delegation talks if the visit is to produce more than a joint photograph.

The SCO table is more crowded. China and Russia treat the group as a venue they host in all but name. India uses it to sit in the same room without accepting every line those two write. Language on terrorism has been the usual fight. Language on connectivity will be the next one, because every corridor on the map runs through someone else’s customs post. Modi’s useful test in Bishkek is whether the final declaration repeats last year’s formulas or names a project, a date and a budget line that India can defend at home.