Foreign ministers' SCO meet in Goa today: Here's the agenda

India is all set to host the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Foreign Ministers' Meet in Goa starting Thursday. Notably, India will also host the SCO Leaders' Summit in Delhi in July. China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Russia's Sergey Lavrov, and Pakistan's Bilawal Bhutto Zardari are among those set to attend the two-day meeting from Thursday to Friday.

• The meeting assumes importance in light of China's expansionist policy and the rising tensions between the West and Russia over the Ukraine war.
• The SCO has been dubbed anti-West, owing to the West's bitter relations with Russia, China, and Iran.
• Founded in 2001 in Shanghai, India and Pakistan joined the SCO as full members in 2017. India is chairing the SCO for 2023.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar arrived in Goa on Wednesday to take stock of the preparations and met with officials. In 2020, India first proposed the inclusion of English as an official language of communication to the SCO. Before India and Pakistan were accepted into the bloc in 2017, it only had Mandarin and Russian as the official and working languages.

The SCO was founded jointly by six countries—China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Setting aside China and Russia, the Russian language is widely used in the four Central Asian countries as they were former members of the Soviet Union.

The Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) will meet on Thursday and, after discussions, sign the "decision document" at noon. The event will come to a close with the signing of a memorandum with new dialog partners. The foreign dignitaries will begin arriving in India on Thursday, and Jaishankar is expected to hold three bilateral meetings with SCO Secretary-General Zhang Ming, Lavrov, and Gang.

The theme of India's SCO presidency is SECURE-SCO. Explaining the concept after taking over the presidency from Uzbekistan last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that each letter in SECURE stands for security of citizens, economic development, connectivity in the region, unity, respect for sovereignty and integrity, and environment protection, respectively. The SCO has helped India strengthen its ties with its extended neighborhood.

A five-day meeting of the SCO Council of National Coordinators was held in Panaji from Saturday to Tuesday. The SCO, founded as a successor to the Shanghai Five, accounts for around 30% of the world's GDP and 40% of the global population.