Highlighting the challenges faced during India’s G20 presidency, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday said New Delhi successfully navigated the East-West polarisation and North-South divide, bringing the grouping to its core agenda of growth and development.
Delivering his address on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly here, Jaishankar said “It was a challenging summit and it was a challenging president because we were confronting a very sharp East-West polarisation and a very deep North-South divide. “But we were very determined as the presidency of G20 to make sure this organisation on which the world had put so much hope, and that it was able to bring back to its core agenda of global growth and development,” he said at an event on “India-UN for Global South: Delivering for Development.”
Jaishankar, who is in New York to attend the UN General Assembly, said the New Delhi summit of the G20 has in many ways laid the foundation for the international community to look at its development prospects hopefully with greater optimism.
The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration was adopted on the first day of the weekend G20 summit in New Delhi. The consensus came amid a deep divide over the war in Ukraine, with Western nations earlier pushing for strong condemnation of Russia in the Leaders’ Declaration, while others demanded a focus on broader economic issues. Two hundred hours of negotiations, 300 bilateral meetings, and 15 drafts went into achieving consensus on the Ukraine conflict. Subsequently, India’s bid to manage a joint declaration was lauded by several countries.
In a Q&A session after his address, Jaishankar said a lot of “folks were surprised” that India “actually got everybody together.” “I don’t think they completely expected that. So there’ll be one set of people who are still wondering how that happened,” he was quoted as saying by ANI.
“The other part, which I think includes some people with me here now has appreciated that we got the G20 to focus on the Global South and that the job for which the G20 was created, which was global growth and development, we got them to refocus on it and with particular attention to the Global South. We did that partly by organising a Global South summit in advance,” he added.