In an earlier piece in The Wire, I laid out the driving forces and compulsions behind the coming together of major countries of the Global South and their attempt to forge different structures and institutions. Shunned, sidelined and often bullied by the domineering arbitrariness of the existing rules-based-order, the outsiders were now setting up their own "club”, indeed many clubs – BRICS, RIC, with the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China, the latest landmark on this alternative path.

Now that the summit is over, what were some of its distinctive features and what are some early takeaways?

To begin with, we should note that this was no insignificant gathering of a marginalized group of countries. The total GDP (in PPP or true purchasing equivalence value basis) of the members, partner nations and observers in attendance was well over half of the global economic output, and three of the four largest economies in the world, China, India and Russia, were front and center throughout the proceedings.

The western media went out of its way to, first, ignore this “bad news”, and then to belittle the gathering by calling it a meeting of mostly Central Asian countries! While the SCO did indeed begin as a regional initiative, the presence of European Belarus and Southeast Asian Vietnam, not to mention India, Turkey and others, makes a mockery of the dubious geography of that characterisation.

While the initial impetus of SCO was to combat terrorism, extremism and separatism, its rapidly widening geographic reach as well as its widening agenda, which has now expanded to include everything from trade to global governance, testifies to the crying need for a forum for the voice of the Global South. This summit marked a tipping point in a different way as well.

It saw a shift away from the West and Europe, with one notable indication of that being the complete absence of any reference to the Ukraine war, a key foreign policy concern of the western world. The focus on not just what the group is against, although that too played a part, but on the more constructive aspects of institution building, promotion of bilateral and multilateral ties among themselves, including cooperation on common projects such as AI, signified its coming-of-age.

Observers have gotten used to at least one “big-think” proposal at these gatherings, and this time was no exception. While sparse on details, the Global Governance Initiative, enunciated by the host, Xi Jinping, and apparently developed together with input from other partner countries, follows in the footsteps of many previous initiatives of the Global South.

It proposes five guiding principles - observance of international laws, equal sovereignty for all countries, multilateralism, prioritizing people’s welfare and taking real actions to get concrete results. The last one is precisely the point. It remains to be seen what real actions will be taken to promote the other principles and to enhance credibility of SCO and other such institutions.

Parsing body language is always risky and leads to somewhat lazy analysis, but there were all kinds of overt signs of bonhomie and cordiality on display, perhaps the most significant being the tete-a-tete between Modi and Putin in the latter's limousine. Unscripted moments of isolation and seclusion between heads of state, all by themselves, away from prying eyes and ears are rare.

Putin’s spokesperson Peskov, when asked about the curious venue and the long conversation, described it as being within familiar walls, or "our own walls" (rodnyie steny), implying comfort, informality and security.

The Chinese are big on symbolism, and the choice of Tianjin as the site for the meeting was no exception: It is the venue of the 1858 treaty during the Second Opium War, one of several "unequal treaties" that severely undermined China's sovereignty, and which resulted in ports coming under the control of foreign powers. Later, in 1900, the Eight-Nation Alliance (including Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the US, Italy, and Austria-Hungary; Imperial Russia was also part of this coordinated invasion) captured Tianjin, and extracted concessions - urban districts where foreign "rules" and "orders" were supreme.

More recently, it was occupied by US forces after the surrender of Japanese forces in North Eastern China after World War II. Sovereignty is the watchword of the Global South and a key cherished value; perhaps the hosts wanted to throw a bright light on the striking contrast between the weak, colonized Tianjin of those days and the modern metropolis of today - a key center for innovation and technology, home to China’s robotics, supercomputing and AI development.

It is mystifying that so many people believe that many of these global developments are Trump-caused, and would, therefore, be reversed in due course. According to this belief, it is the trinity of Trump-tariffs-threats that has galvanised these nations into banding together, more than anything else. However, if there is a lesson to be taken away from the SCO summit, it is that it is a culmination, an inexorable step in a trend that has been steadily accelerating, with or without Trump.

The reasons are many: Disappointment with the  system of rules of today’s global governance which does not serve them well; the massive shift in economic heft to Asia, with no commensurate increase in their influence in global affairs; and routinely being at the receiving end of double standards at the hands of the western world. All that the Trump phenomenon may have done to hasten this trend is to tear off the mask of civility.

Groupings and institutions of the Global South face many headwind

Despite the energy and enthusiasm on display at the SCO, however, groupings and institutions of the Global South face many headwinds: first, the participants are geographically dispersed, with the lion's share of trade of many members being with countries outside of the bloc rather than intrabloc (Russia, Iran being exceptions, due to trade diversion brought about by sanctions); second, there are few credible enforcement or nudging tools to ensure that behavior is in sync with professed principles, although that may be changing; third, it is a vast tent, and with no order-imposing hegemon, as with US led blocs, the contradictions and conflicts between participants can induce gridlock – in addition to India and Pakistan, we have Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran, with all their complex regional and global entanglements and opposing interests.

From the Indian perspective it is important to note that all the SCO members and partner countries together constitute just about a 10% share of its overall merchandise exports market -- an abysmally low figure. Therefore, promoting markets for Indian goods in Russia and China, the two other giants of the SCO, as well as all to the other countries, must be of primary importance.

In the short term, India needs alternative markets to fend off US tariffs; in the long term, that search should be part of an integrated geo-economic strategy to mitigate risk, develop healthy diversification, restructure global trade, rejuvenate supply and investment linkages, and unleash the power and possibilities of much closer neighbors.

Ashok Bardhan is an independent economist

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