The Working Group on International Financial Institutions, a voluntary organisation working on people’s movement, has claimed that real issues concerning people and the planet were missing from the G20 summit.
The Working Group also claimed that a meeting under the banner “We20: A People’s Summit on G20, organized last month and attended by 70 organisations and attended by 700 participants from 18 States was forcefully stopped by the government.
“The participants represented the working class, Dalits, Adivasis, persons with disabilities, ethnic and religious minority communities, farmers, fisher-people, forest workers, hawkers, artisans, unorganized workers, academicians, and members of the civil society, it said in a statement.
While the event was stopped by the police, people continued their discussions both offline and online. “The key issues they deliberated upon included inequality, climate crisis, just energy transition, labour rights, social protection, agriculture and food security, attack on natural resources, and digital data and surveillance,” it said.
The inaugural session of the We20 Summit witnessed the coming together of academics, social, and political and people’s movement leaders, giving a clarion call to stand up to the anti-people policies of the G20, it said.
The declaration adopted by the Peoples’ Summit strongly decried the arbitrary action of the police to prevent people from exercising their democratic right to assemble peacefully and freely express their opinions. “This was in continuation with the crackdown on civil society and stifling of voices of dissent perpetuated by this regime. This was also done to prevent any other narrative on the G20 except what was published and propagated by the government.
Massive forced evictions and wastage of public money on the promotion of the G20 have been the hallmarks of the event when the economy is at a historic low,” it said. “The declaration said that this informal group of rich and ‘emerging market economies’ has taken policy decisions to serve the economic and political interests of corporations, advanced the neoliberal agenda promoted by international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the WTO, and has repeatedly failed to address the pressing concerns of people,” it added.