India¡¯s G20 Legacy: Building the Delhi Consensus

In optics as well as substance, India¡¯s G20 presidency and its culmination through the extravagant summit in New Delhi with the release of the New Delhi¡¯s Leaders¡¯ Declaration have unarguably enhanced India¡¯s position in the international system. The consensus engineered around the joint declaration overshadowed the absence of the Chinese and the Russian leaders at the summit.

While world leaders showered praises on India¡¯s presidency amidst inherent challenges to multilateralism, New Delhi also managed to take foreign policy to the people, through numerous G20 events held across the country, beyond the confines of India¡¯s capital city.

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The baton will now be passed on to the Brazilian presidency, but the task of New Delhi is far from over, in terms of helping sustain the momentum built around concerns of the Global South.

Multilateral Woes in a Divided World

India¡¯s G20 presidency came amidst deteriorating great power relations between the United States and China, and geopolitical circumstances pushing countries to choose a binary path. It also came a time when China¡¯s expansionist attitude at the India-China border pushed the bilateral relationship to new lows casting dark clouds over how the adversarial dynamics will affect many multilateral settings.

From the membership expansion in BRICS to Xi Jinping¡¯s decision not to attend the G20 summit, speculations abound on ramifications of Beijing¡¯s intention and approach towards multilateral leadership and initiatives emerging out of New Delhi. Multilateral economics do not operate untouched by geopolitical dynamics, and the Ukraine war has made this quite clear through the challenges confronted by New Delhi in squeezing out consensus from a deadlock.

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As the joint declaration contended, ¡°Reaffirming that the G20 is the premier forum for international economic cooperation, and recognizing that while the G20 is not the platform to resolve geopolitical and security issues, we acknowledge that these issues can have significant consequences for the global economy.¡± Realpolitik considerations do put up hard questions in front of the optimism New Delhi is exuding amidst its G20 success.

Such questions mainly pertain to implementation and resource mobilisation to realise the many promises to work for the greater good of the Global South, and navigate a more inclusive multilateralism through the stormy weathers of a world undergoing an uncertain power transition and diffusion.

Reshaping Multilateralism for a Multipolar World

In this pursuit, New Delhi needs to build a new consensus by reshaping multilateral aspirations, and helping build bridges between the Global South and North, and by reimaging how the rise of the non-West need not be antithetical to the West. One of the most significant consequences of India¡¯s G20 presidency is the inclusion of the Africa Union as a permanent member.

Just a cursory examination of the joint declaration will reveal the human-centric issues that a primary multilateral forum like G20 has to tackle in the times to come, and it would have been na?ve to leave a major stakeholder like the African continent out of such deliberations. Moreover, the role of technology to facilitate global governance and the governance of technology at the same time, for the benefit of the maximum would be a priority task and would require a whole of nation approach.

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India has been at the forefront of innovations and implementation in digital public infrastructure and it will be imperative for New Delhi to foster new alignments and partnerships to ensure a ¡°safe, secure, trusted, accountable and inclusive digital public infrastructure.¡±

On the cinders of the old order constructed at the end of World War II, a new world order is emerging albeit uncertainties natural to shifting power configurations and hitherto unseen developments pregnant with both risks and opportunities. While New Delhi is not short of ideas and optimism to build a new consensus around the call for a more inclusive world order, and multilateralism catering to the needs of the maximum, it might run short of resources to translate them to reality.

Moreover, India¡¯s strategic embrace of the United States and the wider West should be propagated and pursued as an opportunity to build new bridges and leverage resources for crafting a stronger multipolar world in tandem with stronger multilateralism. Multilateralism of the bipolar and the unipolar era will not work for the multipolar one, and New Delhi¡¯s engagement with the world has to be predicated on the quest for effective multilateralism for a multipolar world.

As India reshapes its relations with the Global North while prioritising the concerns of the Global South, and navigates its rise in the East while engaging much more unabashedly with the West, multilateral alignments are being rebooted for a brave new world. In such a pursuit, New Delhi needs to be informed in history and geography, but refuse to be a prison of its past and location.

* The Author is a Strategic Analyst based in India and the Honorary Director of the Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies (KIIPS). He is a regular commentator on International Affairs and India¡¯s Foreign Policy.