Gearing up for the G20 summit and a (surprise) Special Session of the Indian Parliament
What does Narendra Modi's government have in store? And will the G20 be able to arrive at a consensus?
A lot has happened since our last update, which was this fascinating interview with Nikhil Menon on his book about PC Mahalanobis and India’s experiment with ‘democratic planning.
While I was on vacation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi continued to jet around the world in the run-up to next week’s G20 summit in New Delhi, including a visit to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit where 6 more countries were approved to enter the grouping (including Egypt! More on this in a subsequent edition). He also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping while there, though both sides appeared to have quite different interpretations of the brief interaction. While he was in South Africa, Modi also had the opportunity to announce the landing of an Indian rover on the dark side of the moon, i.e. the Southern Polar region, the first time any country would be exploring the area (and just days after a Russian attempt to reach it ended in a crash).
Meanwhile, violence continued in Manipur, despite the Centre’s attempts to step in, which led to a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Narendra Modi – during which he spoke for 2 hours and 13 minutes, but devoted only seven minutes to the crisis in the North Eastern state. The government survived the vote. Horrible incidents of communal and caste bigotry continued to turn up.
Opposition parties, who have united under a grouping that uses the title INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), met again, and agreed to work out seat-sharing questions, even as other differences emerged. More revelations turned up about alleged stock manipulation by the Adani group. And the government ramped up its efforts to tackle inflation, presumably with an eye on elections to several states later this year, as well as the General Elections that are slated for next year – though, as always, Delhi rumour mills are abuzz with the potential for earlier polls.
For this edition, just a couple of quick notes about the two big developments expected over the next month – the G20 Summit, followed by the surprise calling of a Special Session of Parliament between September 18 and 22.
But before that, a few plugs for other things I’ve been working on:
Check out RePivot, a collective – and a podcast show – I’ve been working on with a few others that focuses on the business of news in India. On our first episode, we looked broadly at current trends in Indian news. We’ve since then also published interviews on digital advertising with Jagran New Media’s Gaurav Arora, and on the fate of independent news media, with The News Minute’s Vignesh Vellore.
At India in Transition, where I’m a consulting editor, we published a piece by Vidushi Marda on the dangers of Emotion Recognition technology, and Udayan Das on ‘Akhand Bharat’ and what India’s civilisational claims mean for its foreign policy in South Asia.
On CPR Perspectives, an interview series I’m running featuring flagship conversations with faculty from the Centre for Policy Research, we had fascinating conversations with Mukta Naik on informal housing, internal migration and what these subjects can tell us about India’s urban transformation, as well as Avani Kapur, whose work at the Accountability Initiative focuses on conducting cutting-edge research on India’s public service delivery system.
G20 Summit
There are two major elements to the G20 Summit – a rotating leader-level gathering of the world’s most prominent economies with the broad aim of coordinating economic and development policy – taking place in New Delhi on September 9 and 10.
One is the multilateral side of things: What has the grouping achieved or agreed to do in the year where India held the presidency? We should get a sense of where things stand regarding the many working groups set up as part of the G20 – on subjects like agriculture, disaster risk reduction and digital public infrastructure (labeled a ‘key outcome of India’s presidency’) – as well as broader issues, including India’s big push to invite the African Union into the grouping.
The headline question for many, though it isn’t necessarily reflective of all the work that has gone into the various committee negotiations since India took over, will be whether India can shepherd through a ‘joint communiqué.’
Ever since its inception, G20 leaders have managed to find consensus and issue a joint-declaration at the annual summit, including last year when the Indonesian presidency found language that was acceptable to the US and European nations as well as Russia and China, against the backdrop of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
This consensus now looks difficult, with the two ‘blocs’ hardening their positions. Over the course of the year’s various minister and bureaucrat-level gatherings in the run-up to the leader-level summit, India has had to issue ‘chairman’s summaries’, mentioning the lack of consensus on language connected to the Ukraine war and its impacts, in particular.
Officially, India claims to still be hopeful:
“We will attempt to bring a consensus amongst all parties, amongst all the G20 parties,” Kant, the summit ‘sherpa’ for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, told the Financial Times. “And that is necessary for the future of the G20.”
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Speaking to the FT just before officials convened on Sunday on the outskirts of Delhi to begin thrashing out language for a final communique, Kant insisted: “Our objective is that we should have a consensus on all issues, including the Bali para, including geopolitics.”
The G20 “should not be a divided house”, he said.
Kant’s upbeat remarks contrast with more gloomy forecasts from some western delegations. Two European officials involved in preparations for the summit said there was a strong possibility that no joint statement would be reached given the impasse over Ukraine, with far more entrenched divisions than at last year’s summit in Indonesia.”
Then there are all the smaller bilateral sub-plots. Chinese President Xi Jinping has decided not to attend, making clear that New Delhi and Beijing continue to drift even farther apart, and potentially making consensus even more unlikely.
An ‘early harvest’ trade deal with the United Kingdom, that some expected alongside Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s visit, has been ruled out. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also meet US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron. And, just days before the summit in New Delhi, he will pop out to Jakarta to attend the ASEAN-India and East Asia summits. Right after the G20 summit, Modi will host Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman for a state visit.
The other major element will be domestic-focused. The Bharatiya Janata Party sees the G20 summit as a huge opportunity to burnish Modi’s ‘Vishwa Guru’ (teacher to the world) claims ahead of the General Elections due next year, and even concerns about discord between the ‘West’ and the Russia-China bloc seem unlikely to come in the way of the efforts to prop up the prime minister.
We’ve spoken about the leveraging of the G20 and foreign policy for domestic gains in the past, but it’s likely that the BJP will move immediately to capitalise on the aftermath of the summit, which brings us to our second note…
Special Session of Parliament
As the grand Opposition INDIA gathering was meeting in Mumbai on Thursday, the government made a surprise announcement calling for a special session of Parliament from September 18 to September 22. As has been characteristic of the BJP over the last nine years, it made no effort to carry other parties along with it – divulging no details about a session that will feature a full five sittings, with no question hour or time for private members’ bills, i.e. laws proposed by those beyond the government.
Naturally, the announcement set Delhi ablaze with speculation about what was likely to be on the agenda. What is almost a given is the likelihood of fulsome praise being heaped on Modi and his government for presumed achievements at the G20 summit, as well as the sucess of Chandrayaan-3, the moon lander. Another expectation is that this session will be conducted in the new Parliament building, which was inaugurated earlier this year but not used for the Monsoon session.
But five sittings suggests that the government has more than just a victory lap in mind. Initial buzz brought up the Uniform Civil Code and the Women’s Reservation Bill as potential legislative moves that the government may push in the session, although there are credible reasons why neither may happen. (There are also three big bills to replace the colonial laws underpinning India’s criminal justice system, though those are in commmittee at the moment).
In the case of the UCC, the government still has to explain how it would bring all Indian citizens onto a common code – instead of permitting personal laws for those of different faiths – especially given concerns for impacts on the tribal community, who are a key part of the BJP’s electoral calculations.
The Women’s Reservation Bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha, the Indian Parliament’s upper house, in 2010, with the intent of reserving 1/3rd of all seats in Parliament’s lower house, as well as state assemblies for women. At the time, the bill failed to get through the lower house, because of opposition from a number of parties that were demanding a sub-categorisation within the women’s quota for those from Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities.
Since then, political parties have continually paid lip service to the idea of reserving a third of political seats for women, without doing much to make it a reality. As with the UCC, there has been little clarity on how the BJP would turn this into a reality without running into the same electoral concerns – involving OBCs in particular – that put a spanner in the works earlier.
Beyond these two issues, the other big rumour was that the government might make a push for ‘simultaneous elections.’ The BJP has for years now spoken of the need to synchronise national and state elections, with the stated aim of lowering costs, reducing time in which the model code of conduct (which prevents certain policies from being announced in the run-up to elections) is in force, and reducing the strain on security forces.
The BJP has tended to give short shrift to the many concerns about moving to synchronise elections in a Parliamentary democracy, which broadly fall into three buckets:
Research has suggested that simultaneous national and state elections will end up benefiting national parties, at the cost of regional ones – a move that could have a major effect on Indian federalism.
The Law Commission and the NITI Aayog’s proposals for simultaneous elections in 2018 and 2019 suggested the introduction of ‘confidence motions’ or ‘constructive vote of no-confidence motions’, where a government can only be voted out by a legislature only if the House has confidence in another government that can take its place. This would involve a major change in India’s electoral systems, one that ought not to be put in place without appropriate debate.
Without such a system, simultaneous elections would then mean putting states under President’s or caretaker rule until the election slots turn up, if the government were to fall – with attendant impacts on questions of democracy.
Read Shoaib Daniyal’s explainer from back in 2019 for more on the question of simultaneous elections, and this thread for more on the subject.
Giving credence to this rumour, the government announced an eight-member panel to explore the possibility of simultaneous elections – or ‘One Nation, One Election’ in the BJP’s preferred parlance – with no clear explanation of why each member was chosen. The Congress’ Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who was named to th epanel, has declined to be a part of the committee, saying that the terms of reference have been “prepared in a manner to guarantee its conclusions”.
That there is now a panel, however, suggests that there will not be a One Nation One Election fait accompli at the Special Session of Parliament. Instead, some in Delhi believe that the government will float the idea and then dissolve Parliament, so that General Elections can take place at the same time as the five states going to the polls at the end of the year – effectively kicking off the process of synchronising state and national elections.
There is, as yet, no word from the government whether any of this is accurate – or even feasible. What is clear is that, between the G20 summit bilaterals and the Special Session, there aren’t going to be too many quiet moments in Delhi over the next few weeks, not even accounting for apparently lost-in-translation moments like this one:
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