No matter what happens at the New Delhi G20 Summit on September 9 and 10, you have to give it to India. Indian officials went to a lot of trouble, left no stone unturned and by taking G20 to every corner of the country, truly made it a people-centric mega event.
The Sherpas of G20 will meet from tomorrow in the Indian state of Haryana for a last-ditch attempt to find consensus on a Leaders’ Declaration, failing which it will be kicked up to the Leaders so that they can resolve the differences at the Summit meeting on September 9 and 10 in New Delhi.
Some pointers as to what one should expect from the final declaration. The SDGs are at a crucial half way mark. The Global Sustainable Development Report 2023 which will be released by the UN Secretary General at a high profile event in New York in the third week of this month makes sombre reading. The Report proclaims that the world is “off course” when it comes to SDGs and more than half the world has simply been left behind. The G20 Leaders’ Declaration will obviously dwell on this issue, but the question is can it come up with a financial commitment to support the lower income countries help achieve the SDGs? Climate Change will evidently be an important focus. But here again, the focus will be on climate finance. Can the G20 ensure that the 100 Billion dollar a year commitment made in Paris in 2015 will be kept and a much higher amount agreed for the future. After all, as the Indian G20 Sherpa says the requirement for SDGs and Climate Change for poor and emerging countries is of the order of 5 to 6 Trillion Dollars.
India’s presidency may well be remembered for the work it did in Digital Public Infrastructure. The meetings of the Digital Economy Working Group have been substantive and the fact that there is agreement among all G20 countries on the definition, scope and challenges facing the digital economy is in itself notable. There may be agreement on the “One Future Alliance” which will be an open and inclusive forum for further discussion and action-oriented steps in this vital area. India’s role has been pivotal on this subject.
India will have broadly succeeded in achieving three overarching objectives. One, it has successfully showcased itself from the view point of tourism, investment and trade by taking the G20 delegates to the far corners of India. Second, India has sincerely strived to be the voice of the Global South. The main priorities of the Global South will doubtless figure in the final Leaders’ Declaration. For instance, the kind of reforms being proposed by the G20 Finance Track for the Multilateral Development Banks is precisely to help lower income countries meet their developmental challenges. Third, and perhaps most importantly, India has valiantly tried to be a bridge between the North and the South, especially on issues like the war in Ukraine. The final Leaders’ Declaration may be assessed against the above backdrop.
Russian President Putin was expected to give the Delhi G20 Summit a miss. Internal preoccupations with the war in Ukraine provide him with a legitimate excuse. And he made it a point to call PM Modi and explain his absence ahead of the summit meeting.
China’s Xi Jinping reportedly giving the Delhi Summit a miss cannot be explained away that easily. Three broad categories of reasons suggest themselves. One is geopolitical and this has to do with the lack of importance that China attaches to what it considers “Western” structures, of which G20 is certainly one. China appears more at ease in fora like the BRICS where it can lead and it is not under any international scrutiny. The New Delhi G20 Summit would have definitely put the spotlight on China, which Xi Jinping may have wanted to avoid. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party may not have wished for their supreme leader to be “exposed”. Second, China’s bilateral ties with the US are delicately poised and Xi Jinping may have wanted to wait for more progress to be made in bilateral ties before he ran into US President Biden. November APEC summit meeting in California seems preferable from this perspective. Third, there is the issue of China’s bilateral ties with India. It is difficult to say with certitude whether China wanted to snub India or whether Xi Jinping was simply not ready for the negative press coverage in India given the state of the bilateral relationship. Either way, it is hard to avoid the impression that Sino-Indian ties are sinking further and a solution to the border imbroglio now looks more and more unlikely in the short run. To the extent past G20 Summits have also had countries represented by Prime Ministers/ Foreign Ministers etc, India need not take to heart the absence of the Russian and Chinese Presidents. But the joint absence of both Russia and China at the New Delhi G20 Summit does smack of geopolitics more than anything else.
Diplomacy and Geopolitics 