Delhi G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting: Maximalist positions of West and Russia drown out India’s constructive agenda

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (right) speaks during a G20 Presidency press briefing in New Delhi on March 2, 2023. (Source: REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas)

Foreign ministers of the twenty biggest economies in the world who met in New Delhi on March 1 and 2 have failed to broker a consensus on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This has put multilateralism under further strain amid geopolitical compulsions taking the sheen out of the robust agenda of G-20 grouping.

The United States and their European allies sparred with Russia over the Ukraine conflict making the Indian G20 presidency a tightrope walk. Consensus has been elusive on an issue that has affected almost every country in the world with many economies wrecked by the fuel and food crisis and rising inflation.

Multilateral Forums Like G20 Strained

As the West hardened its position on the Ukraine issue, Russia and China took an unusual position of not endorsing part of the joint statement that they had signed on in the last edition of the G20 summit in Bali that talked about the “war in Ukraine” having “adversely” impacted the global economy.

The flurry of parleys on the sidelines of the foreign ministers’ conclave also included US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the first time since the war in Ukraine began more than a year ago.

This ten-minute meeting was as significant as the G20 ministerial. The Ukraine conflict has already pushed Washington-Moscow tension to a point of very difficult return in decades. Their growing rivalry is cascading down to every multilateral forum that both countries and their formidable supporters are part of.

The stalemate over Ukraine in the G20 foreign ministers meeting is a loud and unambiguous marker of the crisis in multilateralism. It has been in the making for some time and during the Delhi meet it came out in the open.

The G20 grouping that accounts for 85 percent of global economic output and two-thirds of the world’s population, has a litany of pressing issues to deal with.

The ripples of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the West versus the rest political fallout of it have left the world struggling to find immediate solutions to problems that are rightly on the agenda of India’s G20 Presidency: unsustainable debts, food security, climate change, development co-operation, fights against terrorism and narcotics, and humanitarian assistance.

Ganging Up On Lavrov

With Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov present in the same room, no Western leader wanted to miss the opportunity to make mincemeat of him. With the stated positions getting reiterated, differing views got even more pronounced and geopolitics became the order of the day.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken spoke about how "unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine”. Lavrov retorted: "A number of Western delegations turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian Federation," according to a Russian statement.

The war of words came hours after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Foreign ministers to focus on a constructive agenda. “We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can,” the PM had said and hoped that the meeting “in the land of Gandhi and the Buddha” would inspire them to “focus not on what divides us, but on what unites us”.

India’s G20 Presidency Faces Tough Year

The West was not budging. Nor was Russia in a mood to blink. They also used the forum to amplify their shrill propaganda war to win over the Global South that the cumulative effect of the conflict is the making of their opponent.

Despite various pushes and pulls, India refuses to blame Russia for the conflict and is going steady with its time-tested partner. More than 40 countries at the United Nations, many from Africa, have refused to support West-sponsored resolutions that called Russia to end the “invasion” of Ukraine.

The combustible positions from both sides have been shrinking the space for diplomacy and testing the effectiveness of multilateralism when two big powers, namely Russia and the United States spar with each other.

Though multilateralism can make hay when the sun shines, it is proving to be out of depth when big powers refuse to look past the war clouds hatched by their own geopolitical ambitions. There is no one format or grouping that fits all the bills when countries are guided by their national interests.

The best course for the Indian G20 Presidency is to ensure that the voice of pressing issues is not drowned by the vociferous West at the cost of the Global South. That doesn’t seem to be an easy task.

Jayanth Jacob is a foreign policy commentator who covered the ministry of external affairs for more than two decades. Twitter: @jayanthjacob. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.