After SCO defence ministers’ meet, false claims of India being left out and Russia signing joint statement go viral
After defence ministers representing their countries at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) were unable to adopt a joint statement at the end of their talks on June 26, several rumours regarding the meeting were viral on social media. One of the viral claims is that Russia signed a joint SCO statement supporting Pakistan. Another claim suggested that a closed-door meeting was carried out without India.
Formed in 2001, the SCO is a grouping of 10 countries including China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and Iran. The defence ministers’ meeting took place in China’s Qingdao ahead of the upcoming annual summit.
On June 29, X user @TheDailyCPEC claimed that Russia had signed the joint SCO statement. At the time of this article being written, the post had a million views. (Archive)
X user @NavCom24 had also shared the viral claim that Russia signed the SCO statement. However, it was later deleted. (Archive)
Meanwhile, X user @thinking_panda claimed that China, Iran, Russia and Pakistan agreed to a closed-door SCO meeting without inviting India. (Archive)
Several other X users, including @DefenseDiplomat, @BigWayneConley and @qazafi197476, shared similar claims. (Archives: 1, 2, 3)
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We also found an Instagram post, which made similar claims. The caption reads, “A high-level NSA meeting is scheduled among China, Iran, Russia, and Pakistan under the SCO framework, but India has not been invited.”
Fact Check
According to several media reports, the SCO joint statement was not adopted because Indian defence minister Rajnath Singh refused to endorse it as it did not mention the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack, in which 26 civilians were shot dead by terrorists. India has blamed Pakistan for sheltering terrorist factions responsible for the attack. Pakistan has denied the allegations.
According to Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson from the Ministry of External Affairs, a joint statement was not adopted at the SCO. “Certain member countries could not reach consensus on certain issues, and hence, the document could not be finalised… India wanted concerns and terrorism reflected in the document, which was not acceptable to one particular country.”
We found no news reports mentioning any other country, such as Russia, signing the SCO document.
We then looked at the SCO charter available on the site of India’s Ministry of External Affairs. Article 16 on the procedures on taking decisions says that SCO decisions are taken by agreement without voting as long as no member objects. It says:
“The SCO bodies shall take decisions by agreement without vote and their decisions shall be considered adopted if no member State has raised objections during its consideration (consensus), except for the decisions on suspension of membership or expulsion from the Organization that shall be taken by “consensus minus one vote of the member State concerned.”
This meant that SCO statements are adopted by unanimous consensus. But to be sure, we also reached out to a journalist who has covered diplomatic and strategic affairs for over a decade to understand how countries adopt statements at the SCO. This journalist, who did not wish to be identified, clarified that the “signing” on the draft statement is only if all members agree to adopt it, which was not the case in this SCO defence ministers’ meeting. So, if one member state does not agree, there is no way that some member states sign the document and others do not. It is either adopted as a whole by all or it’s not, he reiterated.
So, the claim that Russia ‘signed’ the joint SCO statement supporting Pakistan’s position over India is not true.
Also, the SCO published a report on the defence ministers’ meet on June 26 in which Indian defence minister Rajnath Singh can also be seen among the representatives of the invited nations. This debunks the claim that there was a closed-door SCO meeting at which India was not invited.
Also, one of the claims, which uses an image of the leaders of China, Pakistan, Russia and Iran is actually from a meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in 2023 and not the recent SCO meet in China.
To sum up, the viral claims that India was not invited to a closed-door SCO meeting or that Russia signed a joint SCO statement favouring Pakistan are baseless.
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