Modi tells SCO to drop double standards on terrorism as Pakistan takes the chair

Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek on 1 September to tell the ten-member group that it must dismantle terrorist financing, recruitment, radicalisation and safe havens, and that it must do so without double standards. Pakistan took the rotating chair for 2026-27 at the same meeting. India accuses Islamabad of sheltering groups that strike on Indian soil. The two facts sat on the same dais.

The summit marked 25 years since the SCO's founding. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov hosted it at the Yrys Ordo Congress Hall under the slogan of sustainable peace, development and prosperity. Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and the presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were in the hall. Modi signed the Bishkek Declaration with them and then left for New Delhi, ending a four-day trip that began in Uzbekistan on 29 August.

Modi's speech named three pillars for the next quarter century: security, connectivity and opportunity. He said the first 25 years built a foundation of dialogue and that the next 25 must turn that foundation into results people can count. He asked how many new openings the group created for the young, how many markets it opened for firms, how much technology reached farmers, and how much daily life improved. Those are measurable tests. They are also a way of saying the SCO should not live only in communiques.

On terrorism he was blunt. He said there can be no place for double standards and that countries which use terrorism as policy, or give terrorists shelter, must hear that the method is never a strategic asset. He did not name Pakistan. He did not need to. The Bishkek Declaration, according to Indian briefings, recorded that double standards in the fight against terrorism are unacceptable. That sentence is the part New Delhi will quote at home.

The same declaration called for an inclusive government in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and registered deep concern over the war in the Persian Gulf, asking for a diplomatic path. Modi, separately, said peace and stability in Afghanistan still matter and pointed to Indian humanitarian aid to Kabul. He also said wars should be settled by talk, not by more fronts.

Institutional output was denser than the speeches. Leaders adopted four memorandums of understanding and more than twenty decisions, covering climate, nuclear safety, energy saving and narcotics. They approved a protocol of amendments to the 2002 SCO Charter. They welcomed work on an SCO Development Bank and told officials to finish consultations for a founding document as soon as possible, Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubaev said. They agreed to add English as an official language of the organisation. India had pushed that change.

India also put three of its own formats into the text: a Civilisation Dialogue Forum, with the first session to be hosted in India; a Young Scientists Forum; and a Young Authors' Conclave. Modi said people-to-people work should sit at the centre of the next 25 years. He offered India's start-up forum as a model for the grouping.

The Uzbekistan leg, which preceded Bishkek, produced a different kind of paper. India and Uzbekistan raised their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership and set a target of $5 billion in annual trade by 2030. They agreed a framework for long-term uranium supply for India's civil nuclear programme. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev conferred the Oliy Darajali Do'stlik order on Modi, who dedicated it to the two countries' tie rather than to himself.

The political geometry around the table was awkward and useful at once. Xi left Bishkek for Cairo. Putin used the week to signal support for Iran in its war with the United States. Pezeshkian sat in a hall that also contained India, a country buying less Russian crude this month and watching Brent near $96. Shehbaz Sharif accepted the chair just as Modi described state use of terrorism as a dead end. None of those tensions were resolved. They were recorded.

Chair statements and anniversary declarations do not move brigades. They do set the phrases that foreign ministries will repeat for a year. For India the usable phrases from Bishkek are the ban on double standards, English in the charter, the bank talks, and the first Civilisation Dialogue Forum on Indian soil. For Pakistan the usable fact is the gavel. The year of the Pakistani chair will show which of those items survives contact with the files.