The flop show of Tianjin

The trip to Tianjin for the recent SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) summit was our globe-trotting prime minister’s first visit to China in more than seven years. Let’s just say Modi and Xi haven’t been the best of friends.

On the other hand, PM Modi has been repeatedly rebuffed of late by “dear friend” Donald Trump, with whom he supposedly had a very special chemistry. That relationship is on the rocks — and with it, Indo–US diplomatic ties too, as seen in the high tariffs slapped on India and the constant barrage of hostile statements coming out of the US.

Nevertheless, India’s mainstream media, whose raison d’être seems to be to project Modi as a genius tactician, as a man who has his finger on the pulse of the masses, and is the best thing that ever happened to India (move over Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar et al), have hailed this trip too as a great success.

Yet, behind the orchestrated photo-ops of Modi holding hands with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, lies an arid desert of one-sided commitments that will only deepen India’s dependency on China.

Modi arrived in China under the shadow of great tariff pressure from the US, which accounts for nearly a fifth of India’s overall merchandise exports. At best, the powwow with Xi and Putin was to project strength and a possible alternative alignment.

The timing could not have been worse for India. Just three months ago, Chinese military assistance to Pakistan played an outsize hand in one of India’s most worrisome military setbacks in decades. China supplied jets, missiles and real-time intelligence to Pakistan, which severely dented India’s confidence and claimed superiority vis-à-vis Pakistan in conventional warfare.

India’s desperate search for new friends

In the Galwan Valley clashes of 2020 on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), Chinese troops killed 20 Indian soldiers and seized swathes of territory along the disputed border. Since the Doklam standoff in 2017, China has been steadily altering the status quo by building new military infrastructure along the LAC, releasing official maps that claim Arunachal Pradesh as ‘South Tibet’ and unilaterally renaming towns, villages and geographical features in India’s northeast to reinforce its territorial assertions.

Modi arrived in Tianjin with his hands apparently tied, willing to make no mention of these hostile transgressions. He wasn’t going to demand accountability or a roadmap for de-escalation, and he practically legitimised China’s aggressive behaviour by agreeing to treat the border dispute as a bilateral matter.

This seemingly technical commitment is, in fact, a dangerous surrender — by keeping the dispute locked in bilateral channels, Modi has stripped India of the option to seek international backing, effectively leaving the resolution of occupied Indian territory to Beijing’s whims.

The SCO itself offers little to compensate for these sacrifices. Since its creation in 2001, the organisation has grown into the world’s largest regional body by population, but its record in conflict resolution is poor. The SCO has done nothing to curb cross-border terrorism from Pakistan, an issue central to India’s security. When Israel attacked Iran, the group immediately issued a condemnation, but when terrorists attacked in Kashmir, the SCO wouldn’t name Pakistan. India was left isolated.

For Modi, however, the hollowness of the SCO was less important than the optics of the summit. With Trump humiliating him publicly — by repeatedly boasting that it was his administration that brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan in May and then by slapping punishing tariffs — Modi had hoped that Tianjin would allow him to showcase alternatives.

Strategically outmanoeuvred and friendless too

He clasped hands with Putin, rode in the Russian president’s limousine, shook hands with Xi and guffawed in their company for the cameras. But beyond the theatrical bonhomie, India secured no substantive gains. China offered no retreat from its territorial incursions, no rethinking of its military partnership with Pakistan, nor is there a plan to reduce the trade imbalance with India.

Russia, for its part, reiterated the clichés of a ‘special and privileged’ relationship while continuing to profit handsomely from its crude oil and weapons exports that India cannot easily substitute.

Modi returned home having reinforced India’s one-sided trade commitments. Trade with China remains heavily skewed, with India’s deficit widening year after year. By promising expanded economic cooperation without securing reciprocal concessions, Modi has locked India into an arrangement that drains its resources while strengthening Beijing’s leverage. China’s announcement of a new SCO development bank only underscores how India is being drawn into financial structures that Beijing dominates.

Equally troubling is the message Modi has sent internationally. By cosying up to Xi and Putin at the SCO, he sought to demonstrate that India has strategic options beyond Washington. But the effect has been the opposite. Trump immediately seized on the imagery, ridiculing India on social media as America’s most exploitative trade partner and mocking Modi’s belated offers to cut tariffs. Trump knows full well that India depends disproportionately on US markets.

The contrast between Modi’s rhetoric and reality could not be starker. He spoke in Tianjin of pursuing ‘strategic autonomy’ and projecting India as a civilisational equal to China. But he made India look like a junior partner fawning for attention while swallowing bitter concessions.

Xi’s carefully calibrated language, urging India not to let the border dispute “define the entirety” of relations, was a diplomatic sleight of hand. For Beijing, the disputed boundary is not a peripheral issue but a strategic lever, a reminder of China’s dominance. By echoing Xi’s framing, Modi has not only trivialised the deaths of Indian soldiers but also signalled his willingness to normalise territorial losses.

His supporters may argue that Modi had little choice, that Trump’s punitive measures had forced him to seek alternatives. But leadership is tested in adversity, and Modi’s Tianjin performance was unconvincing to say the least.

For more than a decade, Modi has sold the myth that he is shepherding India to the global high table. The Tianjin summit has blown that myth—showing India under Modi not as a rising power but as a vulnerable state caught between US hostility and Chinese assertiveness, unable to convert its size and potential into real influence.

Modi’s theatrics may still resonate with his domestic base, but international observers see through the façade.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden. More of his writing may be read here