Opinion India’s world

Too much of text and too little context is the surest way of misreading major diplomatic events. Three critical long-term trends have stood out from India’s year-long stewardship of the G20. First, the divisions among the great powers have sharpened since the Bali summit late last year, but India has managed to prevent them from derailing the main agenda of the G20, to deepen coordination on managing the global economy. Unlike in Bali, Russia and China refused in Delhi to let the G20 adopt a resolution condemning Moscow’s invasion. What Delhi did was to craft language acceptable to Moscow and Beijing while emphasising the centrality of respecting the territorial integrity of states and recalling the resounding condemnation of Russia’s actions at Bali and an overwhelming majority of the United Nations General Assembly. This has helped preserve the unity of the G20, at least for now, and advance on a range of other global issues.

The second question is: Why did the West accept dilution of the Bali language in Delhi? The West recognised it was losing the narrative on Ukraine in the Global South. Although a majority of the developing countries voted with the West on deploring the Russian invasion of Ukraine and demanded its immediate reversal, they were hesitant to back the Western sanctions against Russia and advocated a greater focus on the impact of the Ukraine war on their societies already battered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than make Ukraine a make-or-break issue at the G20 summit, the West chose to work with Delhi and the emerging powers to devote considerable attention to the concerns of the Global South. The US willingness to compromise was also rooted in the appreciation that China presented a more dangerous and enduring threat to the West than the Russian challenge. A corollary to that is the importance of the US getting closer to emerging powers like India in competing with China in the Global South.

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Third, India’s strategic gains from the G20 summit are impressive. Delhi’s diplomatic genius lay in reading the Ukraine situation correctly last year, recognising the impact of the war on the Global South, and demanding that they be addressed at the G20 forum. This helped widen the discourse at the G20 without ignoring the essential question in Ukraine — preserving the nation’s territorial sovereignty from Russian aggression. Delhi demonstrated considerable diplomatic skill in navigating this complex challenge at the summit. Its success in making the African Union a full member of the G20 and getting the summit to accept the need to reform multilateral development banks and provide more monies for climate finance and sustainable development will help boost its standing in the Global South. In hosting a productive summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also showcased India’s growing economic strengths, technological capabilities, and, above all, new ideas to reshape the global order. If a rising India needed a test to prove its credentials to become a leading power,  the G20 provided the perfect opportunity. One of the least noticed outcomes from the summit is the emerging cooperation between India and the West on global issues. Historically, India stood out on the global stage as an opponent of the West and a partner of Russia and China (despite several bilateral disputes). That era has come to a decisive end with the G20 summit. The converging interests between a rising Delhi and the West were in full display at the summit — in producing a compromise language on Ukraine, addressing the concerns of the Global South, offering alternatives to China’s predatory economic policies, and the agreement to build a new economic corridor between India, Arabia and Europe.