The year ahead: Will G20 presidency serve as a political trump card? | Latest News India - Hindustan Times
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The year ahead: Will G20 presidency serve as a political trump card?

By, New Delhi
Dec 31, 2022 05:50 PM IST

India’s engagement with the world has always been part of India’s domestic politics. But it was largely viewed through the lens of India’s rivalry with Pakistan, and Delhi’s ability to thwart Islamabad’s designs in Kashmir and elsewhere. In Modi’s case, his wider foreign policy engagements — visits abroad, engagements with the diaspora, the acknowledgment of India’s role by foreign leaders, and India’s membership in key groupings — form a key element of subtext here at home. His visibility overseas is amplified to a domestic audience and politically leveraged for electoral benefits

It was a warm afternoon at the ghats of the Ganga in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. The final phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections was approaching. And some young men from different backward communities were playing cards as they chatted about the polls.

BJP supporters wearing Modi masks celebrate the party’s victory in the 2019 national election, in Guwahati. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi arrives in New Delhi on his Bharat Jodo Yatra, in December 2022. (Photos: NurPhoto via Getty Images; PTI/ Imaging: Malay Karmakar)
BJP supporters wearing Modi masks celebrate the party’s victory in the 2019 national election, in Guwahati. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi arrives in New Delhi on his Bharat Jodo Yatra, in December 2022. (Photos: NurPhoto via Getty Images; PTI/ Imaging: Malay Karmakar)

There wasn’t much disagreement. All of them said they would vote for Narendra Modi. Among the key reasons was the way Modi had “increased India’s prestige” on the global stage.

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India’s engagement with the world has always been part of India’s domestic politics. But it was largely viewed through the lens of India’s rivalry with Pakistan, and Delhi’s ability to thwart Islamabad’s designs in Kashmir and elsewhere.

In Modi’s case, his wider foreign policy engagements — visits abroad, engagements with the diaspora, the acknowledgment of India’s role by foreign leaders, and India’s membership in key groupings — form a key element of subtext here at home. His visibility overseas is amplified to a domestic audience and politically leveraged for electoral benefits.

Nowhere will this be more apparent than at the G20 meetings in 2023, where India can be expected to use its perch as the chair to push its priorities on the international stage and to boost the image of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of Modi, ahead of a crucial national-elections year in 2024.

This may be a rotational presidency that every G20 member assumes by turn (this is India’s first turn as chair, and it takes the baton from Indonesia); this may be a grouping whose efficacy has come under a cloud due to geopolitical friction globally; this may be a presidency that India could have got in 2021 or 2022, if it choose; it may or may not deliver substantive outcomes. But the domestic message is simple — under Modi, India has arrived as a leader in the world. After all, leaders of 19 of the most powerful countries in the world will be in India under Modi’s leadership this year.

As G20 chair, India will host events across the country. The argument is that this will take foreign policy outside the closed confines of New Delhi, boost infrastructure and local economies in smaller cities, and enable citizens from different parts to directly witness Indian diplomacy in action. This is all true.

But it is also true that local venues will, for the duration of the events they are hosting, constantly be the target of political messaging with Modi at the centre of it and the G20 logo — with a lotus symbol — plastered all over.

It is also true that over the course of the next 10 months, until mid-September, a grouping that was unknown to most citizens until this year will become firmly embedded in the national consciousness.

India will showcase its domestic achievements, from its digital public infrastructure story to action on climate. It will push concerns of the Global South, from climate finance to the food, energy and fertiliser crises. It will articulate challenges and be a problem-solver, as it was in Bali, where the PM’s formulation on the Ukraine war — that this was not the era for war — emerged as a point of consensus in the eventual G20 declaration issued in November.

All this will be conveyed, through government messaging and media coverage, to India’s citizens.

Opposition parties may cry foul, but they may want to introspect on why past governments did not use foreign policy successes — and India has achieved a range of victories under other governments — to raise their domestic political capital. Indeed, the current government could argue that, in a democracy, it is only fair that a major foreign-policy event be brought as close to citizens’ homes and minds as possible. But this is a fine balance, for there is a risk of tilting Indian diplomacy away from its core objectives and turning it into an event-management platform. It also runs the risk of putting off other members of the grouping, who are happy to celebrate India’s achievements, support its presidency, and accept its hospitality, but do not want to become partners in what also appears to be a domestic political project.

Nonetheless, as the country heads into 2024, be prepared for a fusion of diplomacy and domestic politics over the course of this year.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Prashant Jha is the Washington DC-based US correspondent of Hindustan Times. He is also the editor of HT Premium. Jha has earlier served as editor-views and national political editor/bureau chief of the paper. He is the author of How the BJP Wins: Inside India's Greatest Election Machine and Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal.

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