G20 summit: India hopes for consensus despite differences over Delhi Declarations

India's G20 sherpa, or negotiator, Amitabh Kant said the summit's concluding statement, the Leaders' Declaration, will be a "voice" of the global south and developing countries.

With the stage set for the 18th G20 summit, India on Friday struck a note of optimism about reaching a consensus on the joint declaration proposed to be adopted by the leaders at the conclave – notwithstanding differences among the members over several issues, including the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host the leaders and the representatives of the 19 nations and the European Union at the 'Bharat Mandapam' in New Delhi for the G20 summit on Saturday and Sunday. The leaders of nine other nations will also attend the summit as special invitees.

"Our New Delhi Leaders' Declaration is almost ready,” India’s G20 Sherpa, Amitabh Kant, said in a news conference on Friday. He said that he and his counterparts from the other G20 nations had recommended the draft declaration to the leaders, who would take a decision on it during the summit. "India's expectation is that all the G20 members will move towards a consensus, and we are hopeful of a consensus on the communique," added Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra.

Kant said that the draft Delhi Declaration reflected the voice of the ‘Global South’.

Though the Russia-Ukraine conflict cast a shadow over its G20 presidency, India over the past few months sought to play it down and instead focussed on accelerating progress towards Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, debt restructuring to help vulnerable nations in the ‘Global South’, transition from fossil fuel to green energy and financing by the developed nations to help the developing countries take mitigation and adaptation measures in response to the looming threat of climate change.

Kant and Kwatra on Friday exuded optimism about the 'Delhi Declaration' even as the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, stated that reaching an absolute consensus on the issue of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the summit’s outcome document could be "challenging". "There’s still some distance to travel before there is a final communiqué released to the public or agreed among the leaders, and we’ll have to see what happens," Sullivan told journalists hours before US President Joe Biden landed in New Delhi to attend the summit.

"It's difficult to predict if it will be possible to have an agreement on the declaration," Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, told journalists in New Delhi, adding, "We are still negotiating".

Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan are among the leaders who arrived in New Delhi by Friday evening to attend the summit. The others are expected to arrive late on Friday or early Saturday.

António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director and Chairman of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also reached New Delhi on Friday. They are among the heads of international organisations invited to attend the summit.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the summit. The delegations from Beijing and Moscow will be led by Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The leaders of the western nations are likely to use the G20 forum to continue their tirade against Putin for Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine.

The West, led by the US, has been insisting that the declaration proposed to be adopted at the end of the G20 summit in New Delhi must have a paragraph noting that most of the G20 members strongly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and stressed that the conflict was causing “immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy – constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity, and elevating financial stability risks”.

Russia rejected the inclusion of the paragraph, arguing that it did not conform to the G20 mandate. China also argued that the G20 was a forum for discussion on economic cooperation, not on geopolitical issues.

The contentious paragraph had been a part of the Bali Declaration, which had been adopted after much wrangling at the end of the 17th G20 summit held in Indonesia in November 2022. The Bali Declaration, however, had also taken note of the "other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions".

India will have to issue a chair’s summary if the summit ends without consensus on Sunday. The chair’s summary, unlike a declaration adopted through consensus, will not be binding on the G20 nations.