New Delhi: From hosting the 18th G20 Leaders’ Summit in September to India’s diplomatic push with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visits to 12 countries, the year 2023 has been particularly eventful for India.
Among the most significant events for India was Modi’s first official state visit to the US from 21 to 24 June.
But the year hasn’t been without its share of setbacks and controversies for the country — the most significant of them being the diplomatic standoff with Canada, and US indictment of a government official over alleged plots to assassinate Sikh separatists living in those countries.
Internationally, two ongoing conflicts — between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas — have shaped the geopolitics of this year.
ThePrint gives you a roundup of the 10 most significant international events of the year.
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Israel-Hamas war
On 7 October, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack in Israel, reportedly killing around 1,200 people. Since then, Israel’s counter-offensive — first aerial and then ground attacks — have continued in Gaza, a 41-km-long strip that Hamas has controlled since 2006.
According to reports, over 17,000 Gazans have been killed and over 50,000 wounded in Tel Aviv’s retaliatory strikes.
While the United Nations (UN) has repeatedly called for a ceasefire, Israel’s allies, the US and the UK, have supported the country’s ‘right to defend’.
On 28 October, India abstained from voting on a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a “humanitarian truce” in the Gaza Strip since it did not condemn Hamas and its 7 October attacks.
About a month later, on 27 November, Qatar and Egypt brokered a four-day truce between the two sides, which was then extended by three days. While Hamas has reportedly released 110 hostages so far, Israel has released 240 Palestinians from its prisons.
The strikes have since resumed. On 8 December, the US — Israel’s strongest ally — vetoed a UN Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire. The UK, meanwhile, abstained from voting.
Canada-India row, and US indictment in ‘assassination’ plot
On 18 September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the Canadian Parliament that his government was “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link” between agents of the Indian government and the murder of Sikh separatist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
The chief of the pro-Khalistan outfit Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) and a designated terrorist in India, Nijjar was shot dead by unidentified assailants outside a gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, on 18 June this year.
While India has dismissed Canada’s allegations as “absurd and motivated”, it set off tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions between the two countries, taking ties between them to the lowest they have ever been.
On 29 November, even before the row died down, the US Justice Department indicted Indian national Nikhil Gupta and an unnamed government official in a “plot to kill” another Sikh separatist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
Pannun — a US and Canadian citizen — founded the ‘Sikhs for Justice’, an outlawed outfit in India. Pannun himself has been designated an individual terrorist.
The indictment came a day after India, in response to US concerns about the alleged assassination attempt, announced it had set up a high-level panel to look into the allegations.
India has called the development a “matter of concern” and “contrary” to Indian government policy.
‘Spy balloon’ and Biden-Xi bilateral meeting
In November, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held their first bilateral meeting outside San Francisco in over a year — a development that signalled the thawing of tensions between the two countries. Ties had been strained between the two countries after the US shot down what it called a Chinese “spy balloon” off its east coast in February. On its part, Beijing protested Washington’s decision to “attack a civilian unmanned aircraft”.
The November meeting lasted four hours and saw the two leaders discuss a range of issues — from resuming military communications to combating global illicit drug trafficking and even the Taiwan issue. According to the White House, both countries agreed to resume high-level military-to-military communications, defence policy coordination talks, maritime consultative agreement meetings, and open up telephone conversations between theatre commanders.
While Xi reportedly declared that the world was big enough for both the US and China, Biden observed that while the two leaders didn’t always agree, their meetings were always “candid, straightforward, and useful”.
But in his comments to CNN, Biden called Xi a “dictator”. “Well, look he is. I mean, he is a dictator in the sense, that he is a guy that runs a country based on a form of government totally different to ours,” he reportedly said then.
G20 in New Delhi
India hosted its first G20 Leaders’ Summit on 9-10 September. While 43 heads of various governments — including US President Biden, Canada’s Trudeau, and British PM Rishi Sunak — attended the event, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi skipped it.
The New Delhi Declaration, an 83-paragraph document that was signed at the event, talks about the need to “uphold the principles of international law including territorial integrity and sovereignty, international humanitarian law”. While it does not use phrases such as “condemn” or “aggression” to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it highlights the “human suffering and negative added impacts of (the) war” in Ukraine and calls for G20’s support for efforts to effect “durable peace”.
In addition to this, the summit also saw the launch of the ‘Global Biofuel Alliance’ — an initiative to expand the use and demand for sustainable biofuels — and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC), which aims to increase connectivity between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
Modi’s official state visit to the US
PM Modi made his first official state visit to the US from 21 to 23 June this year. He is only the second Indian prime minister to do so, after Manmohan Singh.
During the visit, he held a bilateral meeting with US President Biden, attended a state dinner in his honour, and addressed a joint sitting of the US Congress.
Key deals that ranged from India’s purchase of General Atomics MQ-9 “Reaper” armed drones to its signing of the Artemis Accords — a set of statements that lay down common principles and guidelines for the safe exploration of the moon and space — were signed.
Imran Khan’s arrest & Nawaz Sharif’s return
Pakistan faced immense political turmoil over the past year, mostly involving its former prime minister and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief, Imran Khan.
On 9 May, Khan was arrested from outside the Islamabad High Court on corruption charges involving the Al-Qadir University Trust — a non-profit he founded in 1996. The leader was accused of granting undue favours to a real estate firm in exchange for donations to his trust.
The arrest led to riots and incidents of vandalism across the country.
Although Khan was released the same month after the Supreme Court declared his detention “illegal”, he was arrested once again in August after a court sentenced him to three years of jail for concealing the proceeds from the sale of gifts from the state treasury, known as ‘Toshakhana’.
He was eventually disqualified from holding public office for five years.
In a separate development, Pakistan’s former PM Nawaz Sharif returned to the country after four years of voluntary exile in London. The 73-year-old chief of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), who left Pakistan in 2019 to receive medical treatment while serving a prison sentence for corruption, has yet to announce if he will contest the country’s general election next year.
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Coups in Africa Sahel region (Sudan, Gabon, Niger)
Political turmoil from civil wars to military coups roiled Africa’s Sahel region.
Clashes erupted between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April this year over a political transition that followed the 2021 military coup. This civil war has killed roughly 10,000 people and displaced roughly 4.8 million internally while 1.2 million have fled Sudan.
Niger, meanwhile, saw a military coup this year, with the head of its presidential guard, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, assuming power after putting the incumbent president, Mohamed Bazoum, in detention in the presidential palace.
Gabon also fell to a coup a month later, with its military arresting president Ali Bongo Ondimba after a general election that declared him the winner.
Gabon’s was the eighth such coup in Africa’s Sahel region since 2020.
Expansion of multilateral organisations like BRICS, SCO
Multilateral groupings such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) saw expansions this year.
At the summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, this August, BRICS announced that six countries — Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia — will join its fold from January next year.
Likewise, the SCO under India’s presidency welcomed Iran at a virtual summit held this July. Apart from India and Iran, the group also comprises China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Belarus is expected to join the grouping next year.
Russia-Ukraine conflict continues
February 2023 marked the one year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In June, Ukraine launched a counter-offensive against Russia with the regions of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia as its primary focus. Although the West was optimistic about Ukraine’s chances, Kyiv acknowledges that its gains have been small.
Until September, Ukraine had recaptured 370 sq km of its territory and 14 villages in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia.
Meanwhile, in Russia, Wagner, a group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close associate of President Vladimir Putin, staged a rebellion in June. On 23 June, Prigozhin, head of the Russian government-funded paramilitary and private military company, claimed the Russian military was hiding failures in Ukraine and threatened to march towards Moscow.
After a chaotic 24 hours, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal to end the rebellion. But on 23 August, Prigozhin was reported killed in a plane crash near the Tver region near Moscow.
Indictments against Donald Trump
Former US President Donald Trump faced a wave of legal investigations in March this year on charges that ranged from forgery and soliciting public officers to hoarding classified documents in his private residence in Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In all, Trump faces 91 criminal counts in four separate cases filed in Georgia, Florida, Washington, and New York.
With his first indictment in April, Trump became the first former US president to face criminal charges and subsequent arrest. On 24 August, after being indicted on racketeering and other related charges, Trump surrendered himself at the Fulton County jail in Georgia, where he became the first US President to have a mugshot taken.
Despite being charged, however, Trump can continue his campaign for the 2024 presidential election since the US Constitution does not restrict those charged, convicted of a crime, or even serving jail time, from running or winning the presidency.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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