Beyond the euphoria, G20 lessons for India
Delhi used the presidency to give a renewed push to making the multilateral component of the international order inclusive and representative
There are strong reasons for considering India’s G20 presidency a success. The African Union (AU) became part of the grouping. Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) became a global initiative. An ambitious connectivity project with the potential to transform West Asia was announced. Sustainability was given a renewed push. And a consensus document reflecting the views of the world’s top 20 economies was eventually hammered out. As achievements and initiatives, these are symbolically and substantively significant; they also speak to Delhi’s political determination, diplomatic acumen, and sheer hard work of the presidency’s foot soldiers. Analyses of a long and engaged presidency will emerge as time passes but some observations can be made with a degree of assuredness.
Right from the outset, Delhi positioned India’s presidency in terms of a quest to foreground those universal concerns that have greater salience for the non-western world: Absence of war, sustainable economic growth, public health, and development of physical and digital infrastructure.
It used the presidency to give a renewed push to making the multilateral component of the international order inclusive and more representative, positioning itself as the catalyst for bringing about that change. These moves mark a new return to a conventional agenda of prioritising what was once called the Third World and is now the Global South. This is not a throwback to the past. It is a combination of continuity and innovation in foreign policy.
Delhi’s overarching goal as it shepherded India’s presidency was to arrest the increasing fragmentation of the global order through new initiatives and making India an area of agreement amongst conflicting actors. This reflects in the geopolitical component of the Delhi Declaration — a consensus document — that avoided condemning Russia for its aggression on Ukraine while reiterating the nuclear red lines and criticising the damage done to Ukraine’s infrastructure and the resultant human suffering.
Russia is predictably gleeful at the outcome. The inference that western acquiescence to such a framing was because of its need to cultivate India vis-à-vis China is only partly correct. It misses the point that the western countries have themselves been adjusting their foreign policy by making the rest of the world less polarised in terms of opinion and development patterns so as to lessen the strains these trends put on their domestic politics. A careful look at the Biden Administration’s new economic policy and its responses to the disconcerting aspects of India’s domestic politics illustrates the point. Overall though, Delhi played its historical role of trying to reduce polarity in international politics.
Has Delhi reinvented the Global South? Too early to tell. The term at best provides a label to lump together the collective concerns of the non-western world, where the tendency of an assortment of states to blame the West for their failures persists even though decades have passed since colonialism ended and American hegemony is a relic of recent international history. Delhi made the term its own to lend coherence to its presidential agenda while the West uses it to refer to those non-western voices that do not share its view on the Ukraine war.
There are indeed common concerns of the Global South as the Delhi Declaration highlights. But commonality of concerns ensures unity of purpose and display of resolve. The path from these to coordination of action and production of outcomes is paved with unsavoury political systems, uneven economic development, regional jealousy, and geopolitical competition involving China, India, and Russia. This is not diversity. It is incoherence. Contrast it with the West, which remains, irritants notwithstanding, a formidable and coherent security and political force. Given this fact, it would be best to not overread the Global South.
Another conception to guard against is that power politics is unimportant from the Indian point of view and is somehow a problem of the geo-political North. Since summer 2020, China’s assertiveness on India’s borders has increased, the latest act being Beijing’s cartographic appropriation of Indian territory as part of a larger Asia-wide territorial claim-making a few weeks ago.
The connectivity project linking Europe and India via West Asia would indeed be a geo-economic counterweight to China. But it would be years before the project materialises and its gains are felt. And time is of the essence. The securitisation of the Indo-Pacific with initiatives like Quad is taking place but is yet to produce a deterrent effect on Chinese behaviour on India’s borders.
Partly to ensure that the G20 presidency is not affected, Delhi did not press the Chinese hard enough on disengagement and restoration of status quo ante in Ladakh. With the general election due next year, management of the border contention may take priority over its resolution. The fact that there are no easy responses to the China problem should not blind us to the fact that the more time passes the more entrenched the Chinese position becomes.
Finally, Delhi’s presidential term was marked by an unambiguously progressive agenda for the world and the planet. It also used the opportunity to self-identify as the “mother of democracy”. No concerned citizen can be oblivious to the enormous duality between this laudable external orientation and the strains on our social fabric, political culture and institutions within. Is it too much to expect that what is preached abroad be practised at home?
Atul Mishra teaches international politics at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. The views expressed are personal
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