India, the Global South and the Limits of Convening Power

India's presidency of the G20 in 2023 was, by most independent accounts, a genuine diplomatic achievement, producing a consensus New Delhi Declaration that many observers had thought impossible to reach given deep divisions over the war in Ukraine, securing the African Union's admission as a permanent G20 member after years of advocacy, and hosting the Voice of Global South Summits in January and November of 2023 that brought together over a hundred developing countries, many of whom do not have a seat at the G20 table itself, to articulate shared priorities on debt relief, climate finance and multilateral reform. The presidency reinforced a narrative India had been cultivating for several years: that it occupies a unique position able to speak credibly both to the wealthy, industrialised world through its G7 and Quad partnerships and to the developing world through historical ties dating to the Non-Aligned Movement and Bandung Conference era, a bridging role that neither China, seen by many developing nations as itself a rising power with its own competing interests, nor Western nations, still associated with colonial history in much of Africa and Asia, can easily replicate.

What the Convening Achievement Actually Delivered

This achievement deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as mere diplomatic theatre, since genuine multilateral consensus-building of the kind the New Delhi Declaration represented is a real skill that not every G20 host has managed, and India's ability to get both Russia and Western nations to accept compromise language on the Ukraine war, avoiding the summit's collapse that many had predicted, reflected careful and sustained diplomatic groundwork by India's foreign ministry over many months. The Voice of Global South Summits similarly gave smaller and often overlooked developing nations, from Pacific island states to smaller African economies, a platform to articulate priorities that larger multilateral forums frequently sideline, and India's own diplomatic messaging around these summits, emphasising that it sees itself as amplifying Global South voices rather than speaking for them, was more carefully calibrated than similar exercises by other powers have historically managed.

Where Convening Power Runs Into Its Ceiling

But convening power, however skilfully exercised, has an inherent ceiling that becomes visible once the summit communiques are issued and the harder question of implementation arrives, and it is here that the gap between India's diplomatic reach and its material capacity becomes difficult to obscure. The developing world's most pressing demands, articulated consistently across the Voice of Global South summits and in venues from the United Nations to COP climate negotiations, centre on debt relief, concessional climate finance and market access, areas where the sums involved run into hundreds of billions of dollars annually and where India's own capacity to contribute, as opposed to advocate on behalf of others, remains modest relative to China, whose Belt and Road lending, despite its well-documented problems including debt distress in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and several African states, has still moved actual capital into developing country infrastructure at a scale India's own lines of credit and development assistance budget cannot approach. India's total annual development assistance to other countries runs to a few billion dollars, a fraction of Chinese outbound financing even after accounting for the recent Chinese slowdown in new BRI commitments.

The India Model as a Genuine but Limited Alternative

India's alternative pitch to developing nations, that its own development model, technology stack including the Unified Payments Interface and Aadhaar digital identity system, and experience of poverty reduction at scale offer a more relevant template than either Chinese state capitalism or Western development orthodoxy, has found real traction, with India actively exporting elements of its digital public infrastructure to countries across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America through initiatives coordinated with the United Nations and bilateral partnerships. This is a genuine comparative advantage that plays to India's strengths as a large, poor, democratic country whose development challenges more closely resemble those of the countries it seeks to influence than does the development trajectory of any wealthy nation. But digital public infrastructure exports, valuable as they are, do not address a debt-distressed country's immediate need for balance-of-payments support or a climate-vulnerable island nation's need for adaptation financing at the scale the crisis demands, needs that require the kind of capital India itself often still needs for its own development priorities.

The Domestic Constraint Behind the External One

This material constraint is not a temporary or easily fixed problem; it reflects the underlying reality that India remains, notwithstanding its impressive growth and its status as the world's most populous nation, a country with per capita income and fiscal capacity well below that of China, let alone the wealthy nations whose resources fund most global development finance. India's own government faces continuous domestic pressure to prioritise infrastructure, welfare and defence spending at home over external assistance abroad, a pressure that will not ease as India's own development needs, from urban infrastructure to climate adaptation in its own vulnerable coastal and Himalayan regions, continue to grow alongside its population and economy.

Convening as a Genuine but Partial Strategy

None of this means India's Global South diplomacy is hollow or that convening power lacks real value; setting agendas, shaping the language of multilateral declarations, and building the kind of diplomatic trust that allowed India to broker the New Delhi Declaration are forms of influence that matter independently of financial capacity, and India has genuinely built a reservoir of that trust that other powers, whatever their financial resources, have not matched among developing nations wary of being treated as clients rather than partners. But India's foreign policy establishment would serve its own long-term credibility better by being candid, including in its own domestic political discourse, that convening leadership is a distinct and more limited form of influence than the resource-backed leadership China currently exercises, and that closing that gap, rather than merely hosting more summits, is the slower and harder work that will ultimately determine whether India's claim to Global South leadership deepens into something more durable or remains, a decade from now, a well-regarded but largely symbolic role.