BEIJING: India is welcoming representatives of 40 countries including non-G20 members and multilateral organizations from Wednesday to Thursday as the country, with an ambitious G20 agenda, is hoping to play a powerful role as a developing country at the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting. While discussions on Russia-Ukraine military conflict are likely to dominate the event, Chinese experts believe that it’s also the time to test whether India could really play a leading role by preventing the multilateral platform designed for economic cooperation from being kidnapped by geopolitical confrontations.
As one of the most significant G20 meetings, the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting is taking place a few days after a gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20 member countries in Bengaluru failed to issue a joint statement due to the US-led West’s escalation of tensions with Russia, which also cast a shadow over such multilateral economic cooperation dialogue that should aim to solve urgent issues such as debt problems and climate change, and also facilitate post-pandemic recovery.
India has been under growing pressure, as some Indian officials were quoted as saying in media reports that the country does not want the Ukraine crisis to dominate the event. As holding this year’s G20 presidency, India has been trying to remain neutral on the crisis and some India media said the country is set to make all-out efforts to bring out a joint statement following the crucial meeting.
“Whether India would successfully host this year’s G20 events depends on whether the country will be able to resist the US-led West pressure on dominating the event with geopolitical issues, which will also be a touchstone for G20 as a major platform to discuss the world’s economy,” Liu Zongyi, secretary-general of the Research Center for China-South Asia Cooperation at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
The US-led West has been insisting on putting geopolitical and security issues on the G20 agenda, which not only erodes the positioning of the mechanism and spirit of the G20 as a global economic governance platform but also hurts global cooperation to cope with the current challenges, experts said. But given the growing division at the recent G20 meetings, it will be difficult to coordinate positions of different countries at the foreign ministers’ gathering, especially amid the Ukraine crisis, they noted.
Some Western media also called it a test for Indian diplomacy as it’s time to see if the country could navigate foreign relations while avoiding rivalries affecting the outcomes of the meeting that senior diplomats such as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang are expected to attend. The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Tuesday that Foreign Minister Qin Gang will attend the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi on March 2 at the invitation of External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar of G20 President India.
–The Daily Mail-Global Times exchange item
