When Prime Minister Narendra Modi leaned in for a lively exchange with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Tianjin Summit last week, videos released seemingly showed other heads of state, including Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, looking on mutely from the sidelines.
The frames seemed to tell a geopolitical story in miniature. Three leaders, commanding nearly half the world’s population and a quarter of the global GDP, were coming together, forging a bond which may well upset the accepted unipolar global order.
Was this then really the start of an Asian century? Or was this just another political gathering that hard realpolitik would consign to the dustbin of history? Just as it had at the Bandung Conference, where India and China dominated a gathering of 29 Asian and African nations, and many thought that the Global South had come into being a force to reckon with.
The Bandung spirit was swept away in the Himalayan rage, which followed when the Chinese PLA marched into Ladakh and Arunachal, sparking decades of mutual suspicion and competition on virtually every front—from military to economy, health and cornering of resources.
However, even the staunchest ‘Cassandras of doom’ will admit the timing of and images from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin as striking.
Just as video grabs of leaders of the three nuclear powers coming together were flashing on television sets, US President Donald Trump was escalating his tariff war on India and taking to Truth Social to claim victory.
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On Monday, Trump declared that India had offered to cut tariffs on the US goods to zero. “They have now offered to cut their tariffs to nothing, but it’s getting late. They should have done so years ago,” he wrote. The boast came after Trump imposed a total duty of up to 50% on Indian exports, threatening to upend one of Washington’s most important strategic partnerships in Asia.
Trump’s posturing highlighted a paradox: even as Washington squeezes New Delhi economically, Modi was very publicly aligning himself, at least in optics, with the leaders America views as its chief adversaries.
Trump’s greatest adversary, Xi, must have felt satisfied with the optics of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Modi and Putin, in a move which clearly seems to undermine the US’s Indo-Pacific vision, cultivated over decades as an alternative to China’s Silk Route strategy of hegemony over trade and trading routes in the Asia-Pacific.
Xi’s ‘Global South’ Vision vs. Indian Pragmatism
On the other hand, one has to understand for Modi the summit was less about endorsing Xi’s worldview of what he calls the ‘Global South’ than about signalling India’s strategic autonomy. This has been something that India has harped upon from the days of Nehru’s Non-Aligned Meets to Indira Gandhi’s successfully thumbing a nose at Washington and breaking Pakistan into two.
The meeting with Xi was the two leaders’ first substantive engagement since the bloody Galwan Valley clash of 2020. Both leaders agreed to stabilise their Himalayan frontier, with Modi calling border peace an “insurance policy” for the broader relationship. They announced the resumption of direct flights and pledged to restart stalled economic dialogues. This was not reconciliation; the mistrust runs too deep. But it was pragmatic de-escalation and, crucially, a reminder to Washington that India will not be cornered into dependence.
If the Xi–Modi meeting was about thawing rivalry, Modi’s session with Putin showcased continuity. The two leaders even arrived at their bilateral meeting in a Russian-made Aurus sedan, a theatrical flourish underscoring solidarity.
India now sources 36% of its crude oil from Russia, taking advantage of discounted prices despite Western sanctions. Defence cooperation also remains strong—Russia continues to supply core weapons systems, even as India diversifies.
Critics among both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill say Trump’s tariffs run the risk of backfiring. By punishing India for its Russian oil purchases, Washington is inadvertently reinforcing the very Moscow–New Delhi ties it wishes to weaken.
The summit also revealed Pakistan’s isolation. Following an April terror attack in Pahalgam by an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 26 people, India has held Islamabad responsible. In the war of drones and missiles that followed, China was believed to be supporting Islamabad militarily and with intelligence inputs.
Modi’s ease and new-found bonhomie with Xi and Putin, juxtaposed with Shehbaz Sharif’s dour presence at Tianjin, seemed to symbolise the shifting sands: India was central, Pakistan somewhere in the distant periphery.
Islamabad has leaned toward Washington, even crediting Trump for mediating a ceasefire that New Delhi insists came only after Pakistan’s generals directly sought one. But Tianjin’s visuals seemed to tell a different tale of Pakistan as a bystander to the real conversation.
What Tianjin Signals
The SCO Summit will not erase Galwan’s scars, nor will it undo India’s deepening defence and technology partnerships with the United States. China’s support for Pakistan will remain an enduring irritant. And Indian policymakers will remain wary of Beijing’s long-term ambitions.
However, Tianjin marked something important—a strategic pause in Sino-Indian hostility, an affirmation of Indo-Russian continuity, and a visible demonstration that New Delhi has alternatives at a time when Washington is treating it like a trade adversary rather than a strategic partner. American policymakers possibly realise that this may be a dangerous misreading of Indian politics, and the damage done will take years to repair.
Since Independence, Indian foreign policy has been haunted by the fear of overdependence on any great power, whether the Soviet Union in the 1970s or the USA of today. Trump’s punitive tariffs and public lecturing risk reviving that fear and accelerating India’s natural instinct to hedge.
That hedge increasingly points toward Eurasia. Within BRICS+, the SCO, and the G-20, India is carving space for itself as a leader in the Global South. It does mark an alternative trajectory. One in which India does not abandon its ties with Washington but also does not allow them to define its strategic horizon.
The writer is the former head of PTI’s eastern region network.
