SCO puts English in the charter and rejects double standards on terror

The 26th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation closed in Bishkek on 1 September with a declaration that gave India two items it has asked for over several years. English became an official and working language of the grouping, alongside Russian and Chinese. Member states also wrote that double standards in the fight against terrorism are unacceptable.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed the text with the other heads of state. In the hall were 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, Tajikistan and host Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov chaired the meeting on the SCO's 25th anniversary.

Modi used the anniversary to repeat a three-letter formula he tabled at the previous summit: Security, Connectivity, Opportunity. He said the next 25 years should turn those words into results. On security he went further than the usual communique language. He told the room that countries which use terrorism as an instrument of state policy and give terrorists shelter must be told that terror is not a strategic asset. He named financing, recruitment, radicalisation and safe havens as the parts that have to be taken apart together, not in sequence after each attack.

Shehbaz Sharif was sitting there when he said it. Indian briefers framed the line as a message to Pakistan. The declaration did not name Islamabad. It did adopt the double-standards phrase New Delhi wanted.

On West Asia, Modi spoke with Pezeshkian in the building a day after the two men had met for the first time since the U.S.-Iran war began. He told the summit that a conflict in one region no longer stays there. It hits energy security, maritime trade and supply chains, and the Global South pays first. Resolution, he said, comes through dialogue and diplomacy, not the battlefield. The declaration took a harder line toward Washington than that speech did. It opposed unilateral coercive sanctions, expressed support for Iran's sovereignty and called for a diplomatic end to the war.

That split is the SCO in one paragraph. India wants the terror language and a commercial route into Central Asia while the Hormuz fight disrupts sea trade. China, Russia and Iran want the grouping to function as a political counterweight to U.S. sanctions. Both drafts survived.

The Ministry of External Affairs listed 13 outcomes it cares about, covering counter-terrorism, transnational crime, energy, climate and artificial intelligence. India will host an SCO Civilisation Dialogue Forum later this year. A Young Scientist Forum and a Young Author's Conclave also went into the packet. Four memorandums of understanding and more than twenty decisions and statements were adopted on climate, nuclear safety, energy conservation and narcotics.

A protocol on charter amendments will let India take part in rewriting the organisation's rules as English comes in. That is institutional, not ceremonial. For 25 years the working languages have been Russian and Chinese. Adding English changes who can draft, who can chair a working group without an interpreter, and who can place text on the table at short notice.

Putin and Xi are due in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September for the BRICS summit. The three leaders were photographed together in Bishkek, as they were in Tianjin in 2025. Modi had already met Putin on the sidelines on 31 August and told him the world should move from endless war to an end of war. The External Affairs Ministry said they discussed West Asia and the Black Sea, where Indian seafarers have been attacked by both Russian and Ukrainian forces in recent months.

Modi left for New Delhi after the signing. The declaration is now the public record of what this club would and would not say in the seventh month of the Iran war and in the presence of Pakistan's prime minister. The terror sentence is in writing. So is the line that defends Iran against sanctions. Both will be quoted back at New Delhi the next time either file moves.