Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host the virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on Tuesday, which is expected to be attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, among others.
The summit is expected to begin at 12.30 pm and conclude around 3 pm. The summit was scheduled to take place in-person in New Delhi, but the plan was changed early June.
The SCO Foreign ministers’ meeting took place in-person in Goa, which was attended by Pakistan’s Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, China’s Qin Gang and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, among others. The last SCO summit took place in-person in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in September last year. India’s association with the SCO began in 2005 as an Observer country. India became a full Member State at the Astana Summit in 2017.
In the past six years, India has played a “very active and constructive role” in all spheres of activities of the SCO, an official said. In September 2022, India for the first time, took over the presidency of the SCO from Uzbekistan at the Samarkand Summit.
Source : Indian Express
