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On Saturday morning, the world’s top leaders will gather in New Delhi for the G20 Summit to discuss the global challenges of our times — and to possibly find a direction towards resolving some of them.
India has hosted multilateral conferences, events, and summits earlier — the UNESCO conference in 1956, the Asian Games of 1982, the famous NAM Summit of March 1983, the Commonwealth Games of 2010, and the India-Africa Forum Summit in 2015. None of those could have rivalled the scale and importance of the G20 Summit of 2023.
For the first time, leaders of all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — called the P-5 countries — will be in New Delhi at the same time. China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin have chosen to give the Summit a miss, but they will be represented by Premier Li Qiang and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov respectively. The two-day Summit will conclude on Sunday. From India’s perspective, here are five things to take note of, and to watch out for.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has polarised the grouping, and India’s biggest challenge is to negotiate a “compromise” document in the G20 communique. While the G7, the grouping of the world’s richest democracies, wants condemnatory language on Russia’s actions and words, Moscow and Beijing will allow none of that in the declaration.
At the G20 Summit in Bali last year, Indonesian negotiators managed to broker a compromise and find a language formulation that was acceptable to both the US-led Western alliance and the Russia-China bloc. Indian negotiators too would want to produce a consensus joint communique. But this will need a lot of work from negotiators on all sides, and the final statement is expected to go down to the wire.
In taking the G20 meetings and priorities to every part of the country, India reimagined the Presidency in a way no host has done so far. Indonesia tried a similar approach, holding some 25 meetings, but India’s 200-plus meetings across more than 50 locations has created a new template in size and scale.
While some critics saw this approach as a political campaign by the Narendra Modi government ahead of Lok Sabha polls, it has ensured widespread awareness of India’s Presidency across cities and even Tier-2 towns. This could over time result in a situation where foreign policy and diplomacy become a talking point in India’s elections.
India is discussing an ambitious set of proposals across sectors — digital public infrastructure (thanks to the success of digital payments in India), gender, development, multilateral reforms, climate change, health and future pandemics, use of technology, etc.
On most of these issues, the Sherpas will have to come up with final, actionable, concrete outcomes for the leaders’ declaration. These deliverables are also being discussed so they can be implemented by the future presidencies — Brazil and South Africa are next.
India has taken up the mantle of leading the developing and underdeveloped world during its G20 Presidency. The economic shocks delivered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war engendered issues of food security and a crisis in fuel and fertiliser prices, which have hit the developing and the underdeveloped countries hard. New Delhi took the lead in organising the Voice of the Global South Summit in January this year, which was attended by about 120 countries. The views and concerns expressed by these countries were brought to the table of the G20, who comprise 85% of the world’s GDP and 75% of global trade.
In addition to articulating the concerns of the Global South, India has advocated the expansion of the G20 by including the African Union, which represents the 54 countries of the continent. The G20 now has only one African country — South Africa — as a member.
Should the G20 be expanded to G21 by the end of the Delhi Summit, India’s claim to permanent membership of the UN Security Council will have been strengthened further — it will have garnered the support and goodwill of the Global South, including the countries of the African continent.
The biggest complication for India is presented by China. India’s strained ties with China over the ongoing border standoff will be underlined by President Xi’s conspicuous and telling absence from the Summit. Xi’s absence also shows the limits of multilateral summits insofar as New Delhi and Beijing have been unable to keep their differences from coming in the way of a multilateral summit.
Despite the border dispute, the two countries have earlier cooperated at the United Nations, BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Climate Change Conference (COP), and even the G20. Now, there is a danger of bilateral ties going the India-Pakistan way at multilateral fora — the virtual collapse of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) being an example.
President Xi’s decision to stay away has put the consensus for the communique at risk. Premier Li has the tough task of bridging the gap and rebuilding trust.
