View: How PM Modi successfully turned Indian presidency into the people’s G20
A day before the G20 summit, I had made three predictions:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi would remove the last obstacles.
Indian diplomats would craft a communiqué on which a consensus would be reached.
The Indian presidency would be seen as a turning point in G20 history.
The first two of these predictions have come true. As S Jaishankar said in an interview, the PM did speak to clear the path with some of his counterparts at critical moments.
Regarding our diplomats’ penmanship, the communiqué bears testimony to it. The validity, or lack thereof, of the third prediction will reveal itself only over time.
It is commonly argued that notwithstanding the contentious negotiations, which keep sherpas awake for nights, G20 communiqués are forgotten no sooner than they have been approved by the membership.
Nevertheless, a good case can be made for a different fate of this one.
This G20 summit will go down as the moment of a discrete shift in the geopolitical balance among nations. The summit has catapulted India decisively into the big league and placed Modi among a small number of world leaders whose voice will count for more than the others.
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead noted that the summit reflected three continuing shifts.
‘The first and, from an American standpoint, the most beneficial of these developments,’ he wrote, ‘is the emergence of India as one of the world’s leading powers and as an increasingly close partner of the US. The G20 summit was apersonal diplomatic triumph for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.’
More subtly, as Mead went on to add, the summit reflected ‘the accelerating decline in Europe’s global influence and reach’.
