Reports of the death of multilateralism are greatly exaggerated, it would seem, from the outcomes of the G-20 summit in India, especially the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration (NDLD). Throughout India’s G-20 presidency, no ministerial meeting had been able to issue a joint statement and the ‘Sherpas’ most closely involved with negotiations said they often thought that they could not bring all the G-20 members on board in the context of the language of the document, especially on the subject of Ukraine. While the Sherpa team methodically whittled away at the language, ensuring a document that was acceptable to all, the government’s bilateral forays succeeded in giving nearly all G-20 members a stake in the success of India’s presidency. In the past year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Japan, Australia, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, France, South Africa and Indonesia, and hosted leaders of Germany, Italy, Australia and Japan, all members of the G-20 with considerable influence on the process. Regardless of their reasoning, the absence of Russian and Chinese Presidents at the G-20 summit ensured a less fractious gathering, and helped more than hindered. To look at it more broadly, it is India’s policy ‘mantras’ of multilateralism, multipolarity and the “middle way” that won the day at Bharat Mandapam, the venue of the G-20 summit in Delhi.
The multilateralism factor
To begin with, it is clear that the desire to support multilateralism is what drove the concessions made in order to achieve consensus at the G-20. The ‘western bloc’ comprising the G-7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.), the European Union (EU), and U.S. allies Australia and South Korea made the larger part of these concessions by agreeing to the removal of direct pointers to Russia in the operative paragraphs that referred to the war in Ukraine. The only mention of Russia in the statement was a positive one, pertaining to the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and the desire of all members to revive the mechanism that would give Russia more access to the international SWIFT financial system, and, in return, a removal of blocks to Ukrainian grain export.
