Not without purpose

India managed to push its agenda at the G20 meet

Cynics view global summits as little more than international photo-ops that offer world leaders a chance to press the flesh and mingle with the great and the good. It is well established, however, that the real business of these gala gatherings takes place on the side-lines of the mega-meets in smaller, informal meetings and breakout sessions. The 13th meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was no different and, indeed, delivered some modestly useful gains for India. Expectedly, the agenda was dominated by US President Donald Trump. The signing of a successor treaty of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a temporary ceasefire in the trade war with China were his takeaways. The big headlines — including Mr Trump’s giggle-inducing faux pas when he walked off, leaving the Argentinian president alone on stage ahead of a photo-shoot — may have masked some low-key gains notched up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The meeting on the side-lines with Mr Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is one such example.

Too much significance should not be ascribed to the pun-laden acronym JAI (victory), for Japan, America, India, which Mr Modi has characteristically assigned to the meeting. The three countries are members of the Quadrilateral Security Initiative (or Quad), which includes Australia, an informal security arrangement that is designed to act as a counter-balance to growing Chinese aggression in the “Indo-Pacific” region. Some doubts had arisen, especially in Japan, over India’s commitment to the grouping after Mr Modi’s “informal summit” in Wuhan with Chinese President Xi Jinping in April after a serious military standoff in Doklam last year. Against that background, the trilateral proved a timely reiteration of India’s commitment to the Quad. Mr Modi was also able to take forward the gains from the Wuhan summit and two subsequent formal summits in June and July with his informal meeting with President Xi. But perhaps far more significant than these adroit diplomatic balancing acts was the nine-point agenda that Mr Modi presented, calling for joint action against economic fugitives. Of course, the agenda was driven by a domestic imperative: To staunch public and opposition criticism against fugitive jeweller Nirav Modi, his uncle Mehul Choksi and other offenders such as UB group’s Vijay Mallya.

 To be sure, the agenda Mr Modi’s set out for a Financial Action Task Force is a challenging one because it seeks to augment the bilateral approach — under which countries negotiate specific extradition treaties with each other — with a globalised, standardised jurisdiction. It calls for a harmonised definition of fugitive economic offenders and suggests legal cooperation such as freezing offenders’ assets, early return of offenders and “efficient repatriation of the proceeds of the crime” and global information sharing. Mr Modi has proposed to advance this plan under the rubric of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and the United Nations Convention Against Organised Crime. To be sure, the lack of substantive progress on the G20’s original agenda of tackling illicit financial flows may make Mr Modi’s initiative appear utopian. But the series of explosive journalistic revelations on tax havens has been one byproduct of that exercise. There is no reason that the fugitive economic offenders agenda should not make some worthwhile progress as well.