India Takes Over G20 Presidency, Tough Road Ahead Amidst Global Crisis Promising a presidency that will be “inclusive” and a voice of the developing countries, PM Modi said, "Together with every country's efforts, we can make the G20 summit a catalyst for global welfare.”
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Bali (Indonesia), 16 November: India taking the charge at a time when the world is grappling with a range of challenges, including geopolitical tensions, rising energy prices and a climate emergency. During this annual presidency period from December 2022 to November 2023, India, for the first time, will be hosting the G20 leaders’ summit in New Delhi next September. G20 is a forum which represents key advanced and emerging economies of the world.
The G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, which took place in the shadow of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, produced some high-voltage drama on Wednesday after a missile landed in Poland, a NATO member country, killing two people. Poland and NATO subsequently said there was “no indication” that the missile was an intentional Russian attack, and that the Soviet-era projectile was likely launched by Ukrainian air defences.
However, there are few takeaways from the summit, the first post-pandemic meeting of the G20 grouping. The first and most important moment was the meeting between two world powers. The presidents of the world’s two most powerful economies talked for about three hours at a time when the ties between their countries have been strained, and their post-meeting comments are seen as an incremental step towards rebuilding the fractured relationship.
Second, the G20 communique, which echoed PM Narendra Modi’s message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, underlining that “Today’s era must not be of war.” Prime Minister Modi, in his statement to President Putin in a bilateral meeting on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand in September this year, had said, “Now is not the time for war.”
Despite, this communique there was a clear division upon Ukraine and Russia among leaders. For a few hours after news of the “Russian-built” missile landing in Poland broke, G7 leaders gathered quickly to condemn the alleged Russian action — which was seen as a message from President Putin to the West.
Putin did not attend the summit in Bali, and the barrage of Russian missiles targeting Kyiv at the same time as the G20 leaders were meeting, was seen as a show of strength by the Kremlin after Russian forces were forced to withdraw from Kherson — a retreat that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared was “the beginning of the end of the war”.
It later turned out that the missile that landed in Poland had been fired by the Ukrainians to intercept an incoming Russian missile attack.
There was another possibly one of the most stark images out of the summit, as the two leaders — who had met at least 18 times between 2014 and 2019 — met after a two-year hiatus. In their first meeting in public view since the India-China border standoff began in 2020, Prime Minister Modi and President Xi shook hands and spoke to each other.
While there was no substantive readout on the conversation that was captured by the cameras at the summit dinner, sources said the two leaders “exchanged courtesies at the conclusion of the dinner”.
The last time Modi and Xi had been seen interacting in public was in Brazil in November 2019, on the sidelines of the BRICS summit. In October 2019, Xi visited India for an informal summit in Mahabalipuram. In September this year, the two leaders attended the SCO summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, but there were no photographs or statements about a meeting between them.
The Bali handshake took place towards the end of the dinner. The two leaders greeted each other as Xi walked by, and Modi, who was seen seated and chatting with Blinken, turned around and shook hands with him.
And the last one was the handover of G20 presidency to India. India has got the presidency of the G20, the first time the country will be holding an international summit of this scale. Indonesia’s President handed over the gavel to the Indian Prime Minister as the next chair of the grouping. New Delhi will host G20 leaders for the summit on September 9 and 10, 2023. At the closing session of the summit, Prime Minister Modi told G20 leaders that India’s presidency will be “inclusive, ambitious, decisive, and action-oriented”.
He underlined environment, women-led development, peace and security, economic growth, technological innovation as priorities, which are embodied in the theme of India’s G20 chairmanship: “One Earth, One Family, One Future”.
Earlier, Modi had said on November 15 that the Covid pandemic, climate change and Ukraine conflict have together caused “havoc in the world”, leaving supply chains “in ruins” and triggering a “crisis of essentials”, adding that the poor face a “more severe” challenge. He had called for a “new world order for post-Covid period”.
-Dr. M Shahid Siddiqui; Follow via Twitter @shahidsiddiqui
