“We came up with 16 different drafts and on the 8th afternoon (of September), the 16 drafts failed and the leaders had already started coming in,” he said while speaking at Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI)’s 10th Annual Forum 2023 in New Delhi on Thursday.
The G20 summit was held in the capital from September 9-10 this year. Elaborating further, Kant said he had the final round of meeting at around 11:30 pm on September 8 and submitted the final draft. “We had 300 bilateral rounds of discussion by then. I said that no more changes would be made and that our leader does not want a divided G20. I also said that it would be very difficult for India to continue as a member of G20 without consensus and walked out of the room.”
Maintaining his tough stance, Kant had reiterated that if anyone was not in agreement with the draft, no more discussions at the Sherpa level would ensue. “I told them that their leader could then talk to our leader. At 4 am in the morning, all the emerging markets had agreed. I had consent from Germany, the EU, Italy and France. But no consent from Russia had come in yet,” he recalled.
Kant spoke to the Russian Sherpa and negotiated again from 4-6 am. “We said that if you don’t agree, we have no option other than to isolate Russia, and secondly we had to tell them that despite all pressure from G7, we would not allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to come in and speak at G20. We got their consensus in about 15 minutes after that,” he said.
The consensus from the US was yet to come; the country wanted a written consent to come in first from Russia and China. “I spoke to the Chinese Sherpa at around 7:30 am while the leaders were already coming in. He said there is one challenge concerning the para which says that the USA will host G20 in 2026. They wanted a written guarantee that a visa would be given to everyone for 2026 in order to give their consent. So I helped China and the US negotiate and the word ‘ensure’ was agreed upon instead of ‘guarantee’. That came in at 12 noon, and around 1 pm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the consensus had been reached,” he said. Kant highlighted that this showed a lot of gutsy, bold negotiations by India in which it was able to hold its own. “India has never done this kind of bold brinkmanship negotiation ever. It really is one for the history books, as the external affairs minister said,” he added.
