India’s G20 presidency: Leading from the middle

India’s ‘strategic independence’ approach could help narrow differences and bring world leaders to the table as it takes up the presidency of G20

India commenced its G20 presidency in style on December 1, unsurprisingly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself at the centre of all fanfare. The Prime Minister wrote a blog, which was published in several newspapers too. He articulated the theme of India’s G20 presidency as “One Earth, One Family and One Future”. He also promised that India would make the G20’s agenda “inclusive, ambitious, action-oriented and decisive” during its presidency.

New Delhi’s G20 Sherpa, Amitabh Kant, hosted his counterparts at Udaipur in Rajasthan for the first meeting from December 4 to 7.

In the sessions held at the Taj Fateh Prakash Palace and a ‘Chai Pe Charcha’ with majestic Lake Pichola in the background — between visits to Kumbhalgarh Fort, City Palace, Jag Mandir and Shilpa Gram — Kant laid out before them what New Delhi would want the G20 to prioritise during its year-long presidency. This included reviving global growth with focus on inclusiveness and encouraging women to lead and take central roles in development programmes, stepping up climate actions, promoting food and nutrition security, fast-tracking efforts to achieve sustainable development goals or SDGs and building resilient supply chains.

Kant, of course, did not forget to list out the achievements of the Modi government in the past eight years, particularly its “innovative approaches, tools and experiences in areas such as digital transformation, especially data for development, green transition and women-led development and economic growth”. This, according to New Delhi, could offer a variety of good practices and lessons for other nations to learn and implement for acceleration of the programmes to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

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The ‘jan bhagidari’ (participation of people) is going to be a distinguishing feature of India’s G20 presidency, with the government planning to hold about 200 events in multiple venues across the country over the next few months. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will, of course, seek to reap the political dividends of the events culminating with the summit on September 9 and 10 in 2023.

Modi will host the event in New Delhi for the leaders of all the other G20 nations as well as the top brass of several international organisations — just about six months before the next parliamentary elections in April-May 2024. No wonder, the Prime Minister himself on December 5 asked BJP leaders to make all citizens of the country feel proud of New Delhi’s leadership of the premier forum for international financial, economic and developmental cooperation.

India is just completing a stint at the United Nations Security Council where its two-year-term will conclude on December 31. It also took over as the chair of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and will host the next summit of the eight-nation bloc too. It is indeed time for the nation of nearly 1.4 billion people to play a key role in international politics.

‘Very critical moment’

But, amid all fanfare, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar gave a reality check. He noted that India had taken over the presidency of the G20 “at a very critical moment in international affairs”. He recalled that “having everybody in the room” had been “a real challenge” during the G20’s 17th summit, which had been held at Bali in Indonesia last month and had been overshadowed by the tension over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Ever since President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian army to launch the “special military operations” in Ukraine on February 24, New Delhi has been drawing flak for not joining the western nations in strongly condemning Moscow’s aggression. India refrained from echoing the US and the rest of the West, primarily in view of its decades-old strategic partnership with Russia and its continued reliance on its military hardware. India has been circumventing sanctions imposed by the US and other western nations on Russia and continuing bilateral trade. It has also increased oil and coal imports from Russia.

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Modi’s “it-is-not-the-era-of-war” appeal to Putin, delivered during a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the SCO summit at Samarkand in Uzbekistan on September 16, however, was hailed by the media and the governments of the western nations. They projected it as a sign of a turnaround by India. The Prime Minister's appeal also found resonance in the joint communiqué, which the G20 adopted in its summit in Indonesia.

India, over the past few months, also increasingly reasserted its role as the voice of the ‘global South’ as it highlighted in all multilateral forums how the food, fuel and fertiliser crises triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war hit the developing nations hard and slowed down post-Covid economic recovery.

The ‘strategic independence’ India practised since the beginning of Russia-Ukraine conflict allowed it to play a key role in narrowing differences over the references to the war in the “Bali Declaration” issued at the end of the G20 summit in Indonesia. The communiqué noted that “most members” had “strongly condemned the war in Ukraine” and stressed that it 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”. It also took note of the “other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions”.

India has a “middle ground” and it can bring “different parties” to the table, even as it has taken over the G20 presidency at a time when the world is “very polarised”, said Jaishankar. The US already confirmed President Joe Biden’s participation in the summit in New Delhi. Putin opted out of the summit Indonesian President Joko Widodo hosted in Bali, but the Modi Government hopes that he will show up in New Delhi, not only for the next conclave of the G20 leaders, but also for the meeting of the SCO heads of state.

India-China engagement

The other heavyweight New Delhi hopes to host for both the summits in 2023 is President Xi Jinping – notwithstanding the continuing military standoff at several locations on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh. Modi had a handshake and exchange of courtesies with Xi in Bali — the first such engagement between the two leaders after the standoff along the LAC had started in April-May 2020.

But China’s continuing build-up along the entire stretch of its disputed boundary with India and its recent incursion bid at Yangtze near Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh clearly indicated that Xi’s ‘Middle Kingdom’ was still not in a mood to end its belligerence in the Himalayas. The possibility of China making new aggressive moves to unilaterally change the status quo along the disputed boundary between the two nations may continue to loom large.

Gautam Bambawale, New Delhi’s former envoy to Beijing, however, says that it is unlikely that anything China does on the border will detract from India’s presidency of the G20 — “If indeed, the Chinese military times some of its shenanigans to coincide with the G20 Summit, then the image of China will be tarnished and not that of India.”

Jabin T Jacob, who teaches international relations at the Shiv Nadar University, agrees. “There is no reason to think that India-China tensions will complicate India's G20 presidency if India were to get its act together in terms of both, response to China, as well as communicating clearly to the outside world what is going on,” he says, adding: “India needs to work at clarifying that it is the Chinese that are engaged in the violation of bilateral treaties and international law.”