The crafting of compromise language to permit a joint statement at the G20 summit is, undoubtedly, a diplomatic success for India. It once again demonstrates that Indian negotiators are skilled in finding the right arguments to get everyone to the finish line: Convincing the United States that a win for India helps the West, persuading Russia to go along with language that clearly pointed at Moscow’s culpability in the war but without naming it, and forcing China to accept the results or be isolated. It may be too early to assess all of the results in detail, but some conclusions are nevertheless possible. There is still two months before India’s presidency ends, which means time for all stakeholders to solidify what they agreed upon in Delhi.
To begin with, a fuller assessment of the results of this summit needs to go beyond words on paper to what was achieved on the ground. If pious multilateral declarations could solve the world’s problems, we would have already had nuclear disarmament, global peace, common prosperity, equitable trade, democracy and universal human rights, and a lot more. If we have none of any of this, it’s because international politics is more complicated than negotiating down to reach the lowest acceptable language in joint statements.
Ultimately a game of power
For India, the summit led to three major achievements, though only one was directly related to the G20. The first, obviously, was negotiating the Delhi Declaration. The second, on the sidelines of the G20, was the connectivity initiative to Europe via the Middle East, an important counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in collaboration with the US and others. The third was again on the sidelines of the G20 but was probably the most important: the widening and deepening of US-India relations. This showed immediate results as the US appears to have convinced its partners to go along with the compromise that India built, in the larger interest of helping Delhi have a successful summit, with the added benefit that it undermined China.
This illustrates the fact that whatever the highfalutin language of the joint statement, it was ultimately power politics that underlay their negotiation. For Russia, but even more so for China, it was about seeking the support of the emerging economies, often referred to as “Global South”, to counter the West. For India, the US, and their partners, it was to demonstrate that they can deliver more for the Global South than China and Russia. India’s success in bringing the African Union into the G20 was thus a win not just for India but also for its partners — one of the reasons why the US and others supported it. China has a natural advantage in the Global South that cannot entirely be overcome, especially by India, but it is quite possible that New Delhi may have evened the scale just a bit with its advocacy of the concerns of the emerging economies.
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Don’t exaggerate the success
While these are the positives, a proper assessment would suggest some caution too. There is an unfortunate tendency to see India’s success in convincing the US to compromise on the final statement as an indication of Delhi’s power. India is, undoubtedly, a large and powerful country and strategically important to the US, just as the US is to India. Moreover, this was no doubt a factor in the US concession on the joint statement.
But the US also does have a tendency to give a long rope to its partners, oftentimes an unnecessarily long one. A couple of examples should illustrate this point. One is close to home: Think back to how the US let Pakistan repeatedly abuse American interests, going all the way back to the 1950s and as recently as the US-Taliban war in Afghanistan. Further afield, it is difficult sometimes to understand American forbearance with Turkey. Concession to its partners is thus not necessarily an indicator of their power but more of their immediate usefulness. Neither Pakistan nor Turkey were particularly powerful, but US strategy has mastered the art of focusing on a cold calculus of its self-interest. Washington routinely makes compromises and sacrifices some interests for more important ones, even when American blood is being spilt — as in Afghanistan.
Thus, it would not be wise to exaggerate India’s real, material power from the success in getting to the Delhi Declaration. The only criterion by which India should measure its power is in relation to China. Here, the story is a longer-term one and still troubling. India has lost ground to its neighbour quite dramatically, and this situation hasn’t altered even in the last 10 years when Indian growth has been marginally better than China’s. From being about 90 per cent of China’s economy in 1990, it declined significantly to about 21 per cent by 2012, and by another couple of percentage points in the last decade.
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What happens after G20?
It is this relative power with India’s strongest adversary that matters more than any other indicator of the country’s growing wealth and power. India might very well become the world’s third-largest economy in a few years, but that would not change its relative weakness if the gap with China continues to remain large. The pursuit of bragging rights in rankings obscures the fact that the top two, the US and China, are in a league entirely by themselves. For example, Japan, the third-largest economy today, is less than a quarter the size of China. Confusing this material measure with negotiation skills is not wise. It is a safe prediction that the day, the month, and the year after India’s G20 presidency ends, the country’s global position would be not very much better. And this will not change until India improves on this material measure of power.
More broadly, in contrast to the superficial message of unity, what the G20 demonstrates is that the summit probably deepened the great power contest, though this was obviously not India’s fault. Superficially, Russia and China could be seen as having won because the West compromised, but it is likely to be something of a pyrrhic victory. Once again, the US-led West is demonstrating its far greater astuteness in recognising that what was really important was not so much the words on a page but stitching together a coalition that it can partner with in this contest.
The author is a professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He tweets @RRajagopalanJNU. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)