Amidst many fault lines, India has pulled off a superb G20 Summit
Global Financial Crisis to precipitate ponderous deliberations into precipitate, coordinated action, such as infusion of liquidity, provision of swap lines to provide emergency access to foreign currency, institution of elevated capital adequacy norms for banks and extra, loss-absorbing buffers of capital for globally systemically important financial institutions, accompanied by periodic stress tests by banking regulators. The world does not face that kind of a crisis.
What it does face is a different, geopolitical crisis, of which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one facet, while intensifying American rivalry with China for global hegemony is another. In the face of this crisis, many expected the New Delhi summit to be unable to come up with a joint leaders’ declaration.
It is indeed a minor triumph that sustained negotiations by Indian diplomats with the help of those from EU, Brazil and Indonesia managed to come up with language on Ukraine that everyone — including representatives of Russia and China, whose heads of state stayed away — could agree upon, to make the Delhi declaration possible, thus averting the confusion that followed the preceding Bali Summit of G20 in 2022 when the two countries later dissociated from the lines agreed, rendering that joint statement fraught. Contentious lines on Ukraine have been averted by the Declaration’s tactic of locating these in references to UN resolutions that condemn Russia’s invasion and by letting leaders restate their national positions on the subject, thereby accommodating all shades of opinion on the matter.
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