India’s Modi Declares That “World Governance Has Failed” At The G20 Summit

As he opens the summit, which is expected to be overshadowed by the Ukraine war, the Indian leader urges the bloc to establish areas of agreement on global challenges. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, has criticized international organizations for failing to handle the world’s most pressing problems and urged nations to come together on contentious subjects.

In his opening remarks to the Group of 20 (G20) foreign ministers meeting on Thursday in New Delhi, Prime Minister Modi urged nations to accept the “crisis” that multilateralism is currently experiencing. Modi declared in a recorded remark that “world governance has failed” as a result of the recent economic meltdown, global warming, pandemic, extremism, and wars.

“We shouldn’t let problems that we can’t tackle jointly stand in the way of tackling what we can,” Modi continued.

This year, India is the G20’s president. But, the host of the conference on Thursday is in a difficult situation because of New Delhi’s historic security relations with Russia.

India, a significant consumer of Russian energy and weapons, has not explicitly denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russian involvement in the conflict in Ukraine is anticipated to be a significant topic of discussion at the meeting, according to Indian Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra on Wednesday.

New Delhi is also eager to direct the discussions toward problems that the Global South faces, such as eradicating poverty and addressing climate change.

Nonetheless, representatives from Europe and the United States have reaffirmed their belief that Russia is to blame for the war, with Germany announcing that it will utilise the gathering to confront Russian “propaganda”.

Netherlands Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra told reporters outside the conference that Russia was fully to blame for the conflict and that sanctions against it must continue.

The G20 must hold Russia responsible for the “negative implications for almost every nation on the earth,” according to French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.

Instead of abandoning them to endure the effects of Russia’s conflict, she argued that we ought to provide solutions that protected the most defenseless.

Forty delegations, such as those led by Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, are present at the New Delhi gathering.

Blinken stated he had no intentions to meet with either minister on Wednesday. In addition to the US shooting down what it claimed was a Chinese spy balloon that had drifted over North America last month, relations between Washington and Beijing are fraught by the situation in Ukraine.

After the failure to reach a consensus on a common statement on the conflict at a meeting of finance ministers last week in Bengaluru, the G20’s foreign ministers met.

At the summit, Modi urged on major economies to support the world’s most vulnerable people and “reinstate security, confidence and prosperity to the world economy“.

The lack of agreement at the meeting of finance officials was reminiscent of the conclusion of the G20 conference in Bali in November of last year, when the host nation Indonesia issued a statement recognising national differences.