Opinion: G20 Evolves Along With India's Foreign Policy Aspirations

There are times in a nation's journey when its arrival on the global stage emerges as an empirical reality, one that its leadership has to embrace and its people have to acknowledge. India's G20 journey has been one such landmark where for all the despondency about New Delhi not being able to deliver a joint communique was dispelled when a consensus document was unveiled much before the summit's culmination.

We are so used to India underperforming that when it overperforms it takes the nation some time to let the news sink in. And it is not about the verbiage of the declaration. It is about the attitude with which the whole G20 process was conducted.

While the critics were busy trying to find faults - first with the expansive scale, then with the agenda and finally with the outcome - the policymakers were busy trying to ambitiously define India's place in the global order. It has been a remarkable journey, to say the least, where India rediscovered its global aspirations and its ability to conduct mega diplomacy. There were two dialogues going on simultaneously through the G20 process, one within India as ordinary Indians recognised the increasingly blurry lines between the domestic and foreign, thereby getting engaged with the nation's external outreach much more substantively. The other dialogue was with the rest of the world that had often in the past questioned India's ability and willingness to lead on the global stage.