New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will likely be in South Africa from 21-23 November for the G20 Leaders’ Summit. The 2025 G20 will not feature the United States—President Donald Trump has announced that his government will boycott the summit.
Modi is set to depart midday on 21 November to attend the two-day summit, which starts on 22 November, and depart Johannesburg in the afternoon on 23 November for New Delhi. No other bilateral visits are planned at this moment, alongside his South Africa tour.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attended every G20 since assuming power in 2014. Last year, Modi travelled to Nigeria, Brazil, and Guyana. Brazil hosted the G20 Leaders’ Summit. Last year’s visit was witness to the second India-CARICOM (Caribbean Community) Summit in Guyana. Modi had met a number of leaders from the nations in the region, besides attending the G20.
It will be Modi’s fourth visit to South Africa. He travelled for a bilateral visit to the nation in 2016, and attended the 10th and 15th BRICS summits, both hosted by South Africa, in 2018 and 2023, respectively.
This visit will be Modi’s second to the African continent this year. Earlier, he visited Ghana and Namibia in July, as part of his five-nation tour covering South America.
A number of bilateral meetings are expected on the margins of this year’s G20 in South Africa. However, in this G20 edition, there will likely be no meeting between Modi and Trump. The American President announced last week that the US was boycotting the summit over alleged “human rights abuses” in South Africa.
“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa. Afrikaners (people who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also, French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated,” Trump said in a post on the social media platform, Truth Social, on 8 November.
Trump added, “No US government official will attend as long as these human rights abuses continue. I look forward to hosting the 2026 G20 in Miami, Florida!”
South Africa called Trump’s comments “regrettable” and the characterisation that Afrikaners were an “exclusively white group” of people “ahistorical”.
The US Vice President J.D. Vance was expected to lead the US delegation to Johannesburg, according to reports.
Last week, Trump has called for South Africa to no longer be a part of the G20 in comments to the press. The US is set to take over the presidency of the grouping and host the Leaders’ Summit in 2026.
The G20 was founded in 1999 as a response to the financial crisis rocking Asian markets. In 2008, the US hosted the first Leaders’ Summit as the global economy faced headwinds following the collapse of the housing market.
Today, G20 members account for roughly 85 percent of the global economy. The African Union was invited to officially join the deliberations of the grouping at the 2023 New Delhi Leaders’ Summit, which was hosted by India.
The G20 maintains its informal characteristics—no legal mechanisms bind the member states. There has never been an instance of the exclusion of any member. Even Russia, formally excluded from the G8 (Group of Eight) nations in 2014 for its occupation of Crimea, has been participating in G20 talks.
For India, the G20 marked a high point, especially its diplomacy, in September 2023 when the leaders of the world’s largest economies descended on New Delhi for the summit.
The G20 members include 19 sovereign nations, as well as the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU). Some of the member countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, and the USA.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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