India’s top diplomat S. Jaishankar said the absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of Twenty summit would not detract from its importance.
(Bloomberg) — Sign up for the India Edition newsletter by Menaka Doshi – an insider’s guide to the emerging economic powerhouse, and the billionaires and businesses behind its rise, delivered weekly.
India’s top diplomat S. Jaishankar said the absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of Twenty summit would not detract from its importance.
The two world leaders skipping the gathering of world‘s biggest economies has been seen by commentators and critics as a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is using India’s G-20 presidency to showcase its geopolitical clout.
“There have been presidents to prime ministers, who for whatever reason, have chosen not to come themselves,” Jaishankar, who is the foreign minister, said in an interview on Wednesday with Asian News International. “That country and that country’s position is obviously reflected by whoever is the representative on that occasion.”
Xi will send Premier Li Qiang to the Sept. 9-10 meeting in New Delhi. This is the first time Xi has skipped a G-20 summit since taking power in 2012 and the snub is likely to aggravate tensions with India as the two nuclear-armed neighbors are locked in a border dispute.
The Kremlin earlier said Putin is too “busy” to attend the G-20 summit and his main focus for now is overseeing Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has gone on for more than a year. Putin last month touted Russia’s close ties with India in a phone call with Modi and said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is attending the meeting instead.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has become one of the biggest swing nations. It maintained close ties with the US but abstained from votes at the United Nations to condemn the war and avoided joining US-led sanctions against Russia, which remains a major supplier of weapons and cheap energy.
At the same time, India has positioned itself as a bulwark against China’s rising geopolitical and economic dominance and sought to get more military technology transfers from the US and its allies.
The language over Russia’s war in Ukraine will again be a hot topic at the G-20 summit. Modi and his diplomats have their work cut out for them to broker a compromise similar to the one forged by Indonesia last November, particularly as tensions remain high between India and China — one of Russia’s biggest diplomatic backers.
Jaishankar said G-20 diplomats are negotiating on the final communique.
“The clock didn’t start ticking yesterday, the clock has been ticking for sometime,” he said. “We have the responsibility today in a very difficult world. But it’s also difficult politically. There’s a very sharp north-south divide, there’s even sharper east-west polarization.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.