G7 meet and its significance to India

Why in news?

The 45^th G7 summit was held on 24–26 August 2019, in Biarritz, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France. This summit will focus on fighting inequality.

What should be the concern?

As the 45^th G-7 Summit is over, the immediate focus might be about US President’s say on mediating India and Pakistan on Kashmir issue.
But the long term question for India should be about its problems and possibilities in a world with globally deepening economic conflict, and sharpening political divisions within the West.
India’s challenge today is truly on how it’ll respond to the breakdown of the current global order and contribute to the shaping a new one.

How should the Kashmir issue be dealt?

India should rework the political compact with the people of the Kashmir Valley and generate sustainable support for the new constitutional arrangement.
This task is complicated by Pakistan’s furious bid to internationalise the issue. But, Kashmir is not making world leaders lose sleep.
Pakistan might whip itself into frenzy about every word on Kashmir dripping out from the world’s chancelleries.
But, there is little reason for Delhi to be too excited. The world has other problems at hand.

What can one infer from looking at the 2019 summit?

The French President was trying his hand at mediating US and the Islamic Republic.
Besides Iran, G-7 is worrying about a lot of other issues - The Amazon forest fires, Brexit and the escalating tariff war between the US and China, the French threat to impose new taxes on American technology companies.
The world has more mediations to work with than Kashmir issue.
Kashmir might certainly be there if the situation in the Valley gets out of hand and the military tension between India and Pakistan escalates.
India needs to watch out but there is no reason to be overanxious.

What is the ‘Western primacy’ and the changing order?

In any case, India should worry less about what US President might say about Kashmir.
It should pay more attention to his breath-taking disruption of the current global economic and political order.
For more than seven decades, the idea of a political West championing global capitalism, security alliances, and multilateral institutions has been an unshakeable assumption.
After WW-II, “Western primacy” was seen as immutable.
Communists, socialists, nationalists in the East and the South seemed to agree and they demonised the West and railed against its domination.
Few would have expected that the US President would be the one taking the political axe to the West and its core institutions.

What are some actions of US President?

Trump used G-7 as a ‘Political bureau’ to orchestrate political and economic coordination between the Western powers.

At the G-7 Summit 2017, Trump announced the withdrawal from the 2015 Paris accord on the mitigation of climate change.
He left the meeting in Canada before it came to a close and damned his host Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest”.
This year, France’s President smartly dispensed their joint meet.
Trump has been harsher with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that was designed by the West to advance globalising capitalism.
He believes the WTO hasn’t worked for the American labour. He is ready to bring the global trading architecture down in favour of bilateral deals.
He appears to be set on undermining US military alliances in Europe and Asia, a prospect that Russia and China dreamt of.
He is eager to end America’s endless wars in the greater Middle East.
We don’t know whether Trump will be recalled as a short-term aberration or the accidental catalyst for world’s big structural changes.
The post-War economic and political institutions are under extraordinary stress.

What does Trump’s disruption demand?

It demands that India should take a fresh look at its economic and security policies.
It wants India to adapt to the structural changes in the global order, far more sweeping than the ones India confronted at the turn of the 1990s.
India’s strategy of incremental reform is increasingly incapable of coping with the disruptions unfolding in the world.

What could be done further?

The sooner India takes to rework its internal and external economic strategies, the easier it will be to cope with the emerging global political challenges.
But India can easily elevate its place in the new global pecking order that is bound to emerge when the dust settles from the current world turmoil.
If India gets its economic house in order and returns to a high growth path, India might discover that there was no better time than now to change the rules of the game on Kashmir as well as on the two state parties (Pakistan and China) to the problem.

Source: The Indian Express