Ahead of the Group of 20 summit in Delhi this weekend, some international news publications have highlighted the perceived democratic backsliding in India under the Narendra Modi government.
They have also highlighted the attempts to project Modi as the leader of the world by using India’s presidency of the multilateral forum. In addition, they have reported on how Delhi has tried to conceal poor people behind curtains and how the summit-related security restrictions has hurt the livelihoods of ordinary people.
‘At what cost to democracy?’
An editorial in The Guardian, a British newspaper, said that the G20 “glad-handing” will show how the West overlooks Modi’s “dangerous majoritarianism” because they see India as a key partner in containing China. “The West thinks that it must keep stumm because it needs India to contain China,” the editorial on Wednesday read. “But at what cost to democracy and human rights?”
The relations between India and the West, especially the United States, have strengthened amid the rise of a common rival: China.
Similarly, The New York Times reported on Thursday that while the Delhi G20 summit will put India’s booming power on global display, Modi’s “divisive religious politics” was threatening India’s rise.
In the Financial Times, Devesh Kapur, the professor of South Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s advanced international studies school, wrote that at a time when Delhi is set to host the G20 summit, India was “tearing itself apart”.
“It’s a pity...that India’s theme for the summit, ‘One World, One Family, One Future’ does not seem to extend to itself,” Kapur said in an opinion piece on Monday. “The most pressing challenges facing India come from within, not without. At the heart of these challenges lie the politics of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party and [Modi], one of the most transformative – and contentious – leaders of modern India.”
Projections as world’s leader
There has also been some commentary and reporting in international media on Modi purportedly projecting himself as a leader of the world by tapping into India’s G20 presidency.
Referring to the G20 posters featuring Modi plastered across Delhi for the summit, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, a research fellow at Washington-based think tank Cato Institute, wrote in Nikkei Asia that the prime minister was wrongly projecting himself as the so-called Vishwa Guru – the teacher to the world.
“Modi’s notion of being the world’s guru is just as ridiculous as his twisted history of ‘centuries of enslavement’, which has been used to attack India’s religious minorities,” Aiyar wrote on Friday. “A guru is nothing without disciples. If India or Modi himself is the world’s guru, who are the disciples? The least likely candidates are Western powers which believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are the true global gurus.”
Quoting an unidentified former finance secretary as estimating the cost of advertising to be over Rs 1,000 crore, Aiyar added, “This advertising blitz is aimed at financing the promotion of the prime minister in the election run-up, portraying him as a great leader of not just India but the world”.
Nevertheless, Modi’s purported projection as the leader of the world may have received an inadvertent boost from China’s Xi skipping the Delhi summit, The Sydney Morning Herald pointed out. “[Modi] is framing himself not just as a leader of India but of the Global South,” the report on Friday read. “He has just been aided in that goal by an unlikely adversary, China’s President Xi Jinping, who will skip this year’s summit for the first time since he came to power...”
Concealining poverty
Moreover, some international news publications have reported on how poverty in the national capital is being concealed from public view because of the summit. The Guardian reported on how Delhi had “glossed over” slums, and how some of the city’s daily wage earners were being adversely impacted by the summit-related restrictions.
The Washington Post similarly highlighted the loss of livelihoods and displacement of some living in Delhi’s slums. French newspaper Le Monde similarly reported that Modi was making poverty in Delhi “temporarily disappear” with an eye on the G20 summit. The New York Times reported about the efforts the government was making to stop Delhi’s monkeys from stealing the limelight of the summit.
There has also been a focus on the challenges faced by the G20 and India’s presidency of the forum. Larry Elliott, The Guardian’s economics editor, wrote on September 3 that Modi’s unifying message for the Delhi summit looked outdated because globalisation was falling apart. “...the G20 was created to manage globalisation, but globalisation is in retreat,” Elliott wrote.
Elliott added that the G20 had “seriously lost its way”.
To this end, The New York Times quoted experts as suggesting that the G20 should be reformulated as the forum has struggled to make an impact.
In a similar vein, referring to the current difficulties in navigating divisions within the multilateral forum, The Associated Press highlighted how India’s “rising geopolitical clout” and claims of Delhi being a representative of the Global South “will be put to the test” at the summit.
Also read: ‘We have been made to vanish’: Hidden by screens, Delhi’s poor feel pinch of G20 curbs
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