India mustn't rush into SCO's secret 'security club'

by B Raman India, like Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, is currently an observer of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which has completed 10 years. Like Pakistan and Iran, it has sought full membership of the organisation, over which China is seeking to establish its hegemony. The request for full membership was reiterated by External Affairs Minister SM Krishna during his recent visit to China to attend the SCO summit. China has been carefully orchestrating the evolution of the organisation in a direction that would facilitate the pursuit of Chinese interests in Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics, particularly a greater role for China in the economic reconstruction and security modernisation of Afghanistan after the thinning-out of the US-led NATO presence post-2014. In this effort, China has sought to maintain a certain lack of transparency regarding the security dimensions of the SCO. [caption id=“attachment_340691” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“AFP”]  [/caption] At one level, the Chinese have been seeking to remove any impression that China is trying to develop the SCO into a NATO-like military alliance in the Afghanistan-Central Asian region to counter the US presence and interests in the region. Simultaneously, they have been projecting it as a co-operative security mechanism to meet internal security threats to member-countries from global and regional non-State actors. Among the non-state actors that the Chinese have targeted through this co-operative mechanism is the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan, an Uighur separatist organisation based in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan and active in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. The Al Qaeda and its associates active in this region are also in their sights. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which are among the SCO members, also look upto this mechanism to help them in countering indigenous extremist elements posing a threat to their internal security. Only Russia has not so far shown any interest in seeking the help of this mechanism to deal with internal security problems in Chechnya. China has been trying to use the security mechanism of the SCO for dealing with organisations which are perceived as posing a threat to China and the Central Asian Republics. But it does not look upon anti-India organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), which are sponsored by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), or the Afghan Taliban or the Haqqani Network, which are the allies of Pakistan, as coming within the ambit of the SCO security mechanism. Because of the lack of transparency on China’s part, and the failure of Russia and the Central Asian member-States of the SCO to challenge it on this count, one does not know the details of this security mechanism. All one could gather is that this mechanism covers arrangements for intelligence sharing, joint anti-terrorism exercises and plans for raising a joint rapid reaction force to deal with emergencies caused by terrorist organisations. China’s state-owned Xinhua news agency reported that the SCO summit recommitted itself to closer security ties by adopting a 2013-15 anti-terrorism plan and establishing a swift response mechanism. It said that the mechanism would allow SCO members to request the help of other members to handle domestic emergencies. According to the agency, Chinese President Hu Jintao told the summit that “we should establish and improve a system of security cooperation”. Hu said the SCO aimed to become a “fortress of regional security and stability and a driving force of regional economic development”. In an interview to Xinhua, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov said that SCO members had in the past 11 years developed a legal norm and a coordination mechanism, which make it possible for them to carry out anti-terror joint military exercises and to provide security for major political or sports events in member countries. He suggested that the SCO should set up a police unit within the SCO framework to crack down on Internet-based crimes. While seeking full membership of the SCO, India should carefully consider to what extent it would be advisable for it to participate in an internal security co-operation mechanism of which China and Pakistan would be members. There will be very little compatibility between our internal security concerns and interests and those of China and Pakistan; it could be counter-productive for us to participate in this mechanism. Moreover, our internal security strategy is based on the principle that except in border areas, the police should be the weapon of first resort and the Army the weapon of last resort. The SCO mechanism operates on the principle that the Army should be the weapon of first resort with the police playing only a supportive role. The internal security co-operation mechanism of the SCO is now proposed to be extended to the area of cyber security. The main threats to our cyber security will arise from China. It will not be in our interest to participate in any connectivity and inter-operability mechanism relating to cyber security with China. These issues have to be carefully examined before we decide on the extent of our participation in the SCO internal security mechanism which is now dominated by China. B Raman is Additional Secretary (Retired) in the Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India. He is currently Director of the Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai; and Associate of the Chennai Centre for China Studies. Republished with permission from the Chennai Centre for China Studies.