Foreign Minister S Jaishankar on Monday explained how Prime Minister Narendra Modi's stature played a role in achieving consensus for the Delhi Declaration at the G20 Summit, which seemed difficult given the sharp divisions between the West and Russia-China over the war in Ukraine. The EAM said that the Delhi Declaration could be adopted unanimously because PM Modi's intervention had an impact on his counterparts.
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"I think the declaration also happened because his (PM Modi's) stature had gone up. So when he brought up the issue with some of his counterparts, and considering the fact that it was Prime Minister Modi himself bringing up the issue, I think it definitely had an impact on his counterparts," the foreign minister said while speaking to India Today's News Director Rahul Kanwal.
Jaishankar said PM Modi himself came in whenever it was required to bring consensus among the leaders. He also hailed the PM's visit to Indonesia for the ASEAN Summit just a day before G20 in Delhi. He said PM Modi's trip to Indonesia had an impact on the leaders of the G20 as it signalled his willingness to put in effort for the events hosted by other countries.
"The Prime Minister on the eve of the G20 Summit made a half-a-day trip to Indonesia. He flew overnight, reached Indonesia, spent a few hours, and then came back. The impact of that was that the others got the message that he was a prime minister willing to put himself out for the success of somebody else's event. It generates a sense at the leadership level that if he's willing to do it for others, then we (other leaders) also need to reciprocate and we need to back him up," Jaishankar told India Today.
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Achieving consensus was the toughest job for New Delhi as most ministerial meetings ended without any joint communique. It was feared that the differences between the West and Russia-China may derail any efforts to seal the consensus at the leaders' summit. However, Jaishankar said that India adopted a different approach.
"The way we handled it was to tell the leaders that wherever we get agreement, let's lock that in. We didn't want a situation where, let's say, out of 30 paras, you didn't agree on two, so you lost all 30. Our approach was therefore to lock in whatever we could get unanimity in. And where you can't, keep trying, meeting after meeting, to narrow that divide," he said, adding that it was a sensible strategy because what it did was, in the last around two weeks before the summit, "it left us with a relatively limited number of issues".
Speaking on the contentions raised by Russia and China over the language used for the war in Ukraine, Jaishankar said it was not a question of "finding the right words and finishing it with good language". He said efforts to resolve the differences were made both from his side and from India's G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant and his team. "At certain points of play where required, the Prime Minister himself came in," said Jaishankar.