Modi’s G-20(24)

Heading G-20 will give India a foreign affairs year like it has never had in history. And changes around the world give Narendra Modi a lot of newly-opened strategic space to play with

Modi's G-20(24)

The big G-20 summit in Bali that made more headlines with what happened on its sideThe baton has passed from Indonesia's Joko Widodo to India's Narendra Modi. It sets the stage for a neverbefore foreign affairs year for India.

Especially as India will be hosting so much of the world-accounting for 80 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and 75 per cent of world trade under a leader who so revels in grand spectacle. L K Advani spoke brave words once, calling Mr Modi a good event manager, and has been paying for it since. Every birthday of his becomes an event only when Mr Modi arrives and cameras find that one visual they want.

This year-long spectacle will be no ordinary event. It will set up Mr Modi's 2024 campaign brilliantly for him. It will bring the most prominent faces from the world to India, they will all perforce be heaping high praise on its leader. During the year, nearly a hundred meetings will held, culminating in a summit.

Meetings will be taken to cities across the country. There will be much hugging, laughter and the glitziest packing of the "Vishwaguru".

This so neatly dovetails into the general election campaign that it will be tempting to dismiss it as another tamasha mostly directed at domestic politics.

There are many good reasons, however, why we should avoid that temptation, take off our political goggles and put them away for a bit. We might then be able to appreciate how vital a foreign and strategic affairs opportunity this is for India.

Three decades after the vaporisation of the Soviet empire created a couple of years of instability in the global balance of power, another such flux has arrived thanks largely to Vladimir Putin but partly also to Xi Jinping. The post-Soviet world settled into a new unipolar arrangement that lasted a quarter of a century. Until a rising China began to challenge it.