India’s G20 presidency may focus on solving global issues
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar delivered a lecture on ‘Asian Century’ at the launch of Asia Society Policy Institute in New Delhi this week. He outlined the concern regarding “rising but divided” Asia and emphasised the need for China and India to come together for the emergence of Asian century. Towards the end, in what almost seemed like the guiding principle of India’s foreign policy, he said that “India espouses a cooperative, inclusive, and consultative approach to international relations. We believe that multipolarity, rebalancing, fairer globalization and reformed multilateralism are all advanced by the progress of Asia.”
There were several direct and indirect references to China with an emphasis on respecting “territorial integrity, sovereignty, agreements and judgments”, which should reflect “broad-based agendas” rather than “national objectives”. Clearly, India has been trying to push for a multipolar world order at all forums, especially with China making life difficult in mountains and deep oceans along the country’s borders.
India is also moving on to taking the G20 presidency for a year, beginning December 2022 when India will continue being chair of the United Nations Security Council. This unique opportunity puts India in an envious position to steer the narrative on future global order.
India must develop a narrative for the world which is agile to the changing geopolitical dynamics as well as rooted in maintaining the values and sanctity of these multilateral forums. The G20 agenda setting has to with direct engagement with Indonesia and Brazil, the outgoing and future presidency for G20. The three nations, two from Asia and one from South America, are generally grouped together as global swing states which have a significant say in the emerging world order. India will have to pare its G20 agenda with the fall out of the Ukraine war, leading to severe fractures in world order.
It is now an accepted reality that the US and Russian relations are not going to get mended any time soon. China and Russia have grown more intimate in their “no threshold friendship” primarily due to economic factors. Russia will continue to be dependent on China, primarily due to the vocal support it has received from the dragon in almost all multilateral forums. The war has ensured a sharp rise in global energy prices, leading to many of India’s neighbours such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh staring at severe economic crises. Add to the fact that Russia and Ukraine account for nearly 30 per cent of global wheat exports, and nearly 50 per cent of sunflower seeds and oil.
The war has ensured restrictions being put on Russia to export its wheat to the global markets and Ukraine farmers being crippled by Russian shelling are unable to send their produce abroad. This leads to a food-grain crisis, export restrictions and ultimately high food bills for millions across the globe. This comes at a time when the world has just started recovering from one of the worst crises of human history in a century, Covid. Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change in India and India’s neighbourhood are blaring alarms, with one third of Pakistan under water, and at least seven Agri intensive states of India facing droughts. Europe witnessed one of the harshest summers this year, bringing the doomsday predictions regarding climate change closer home.
It is against this backdrop of war, famine, drought, and messy geopolitical order that India will take over the G20 presidency. Indonesia had three broad agendas—global health, digital transformation, and sustainable energy transition—as priority areas during its presidency. It is not extremely divergent from India’s stated targets at multilateral forums. It can always tweak the priority areas to make them more relevant for the evolving geopolitical order.
(The author is a foreign policy commentator)
