António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director and Chairman of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also reached New Delhi on Friday. They are among the heads of international organisations invited to attend the summit.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the summit. The delegations from Beijing and Moscow will be led by Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The leaders of the western nations are likely to use the G20 forum to continue their tirade against Putin for Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine.

The West, led by the US, has been insisting that the declaration proposed to be adopted at the end of the G20 summit in New Delhi must have a paragraph noting that most of the G20 members strongly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and stressed that the conflict was causing “immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy – constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity, and elevating financial stability risks”.

Russia rejected the inclusion of the paragraph, arguing that it did not conform to the G20 mandate. China also argued that the G20 was a forum for discussion on economic cooperation, not on geopolitical issues.

The contentious paragraph had been a part of the Bali Declaration, which had been adopted after much wrangling at the end of the 17th G20 summit held in Indonesia in November 2022. The Bali Declaration, however, had also taken note of the "other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions".

India will have to issue a chair’s summary if the summit ends without consensus on Sunday. The chair’s summary, unlike a declaration adopted through consensus, will not be binding on the G20 nations.


#General