Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a Eurasian political, economic, and security body with ten full member states. As of July 2024, its members are China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Belarus.
The SCO was formally founded on the 15th of June 2001, when six heads of state signed the Declaration of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Shanghai. It grew out of the Shanghai Five, a smaller grouping created on the 26th of April 1996.
The SCO covers at least 24 percent of the world's total land area, equivalent to 65 percent of Eurasia, and encompasses 42 percent of the world's population. As of 2024, its combined GDP based on purchasing power parity accounts for approximately 36 percent of the world's total.
RATS is a permanent organ of the SCO, headquartered in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, established at a summit on the 16th-the 17th of June 2004. It coordinates member states' efforts against terrorism, separatism, and extremism, and by 2017 had reportedly disrupted 600 terror plots and extradited 500 suspected terrorists.
India refused to endorse the joint statement at the SCO defence ministers' meeting in Qingdao, China in June 2025, because the statement did not mention the 22nd of April 2025 Pahalgam attack, in which 26 Indian tourists were killed. India's Defence Minister Rajnath Singh argued the statement aligned with Pakistan's narrative on terrorism.
The SCO is not a collective security alliance. Leaders of SCO member states have repeatedly stated that the organisation is not a military alliance, and academics Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus confirm that unlike NATO, the SCO does not create a collective security commitment. As of 2023, the SCO had not provided military support in any actual conflict.