G20 Summit: Biden to arrive in Delhi on Friday, meet Modi on day one
US President Joe Biden will be among the heads of the governments and states of the intergovernmental forum G20 who will meet in New Delhi over the weekend
United States (US) President Joe Biden will arrive in New Delhi on Friday and have a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi before attending the meeting of heads of the governments and states of the intergovernmental forum G20 over the weekend.
The White House said Biden will participate in an official arrival and handshake with Modi on Saturday and participate in the G20 Leaders’ Summit. He will visit the Raj Ghat Memorial to Mahatma Gandhi on Sunday before departing for Vietnam.
India assumed G20’s presidency in December and has since held a series of meetings related to 32 sectors. The events will culminate with the meeting of heads of the governments and states of the world’s 20 largest economies.
Days before Biden’s arrival in India, his national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that getting an “absolute consensus on Ukraine” at G20 was a challenge, and he did not expect Russia, which will be represented by foreign minister Sergey Lavrov at the Summit, to change its position. Sullivan said most members of both the United Nations (UN) as well as G20 opposed Russia’s “illegal invasion” of Ukraine.
He said that Biden will speak out against Russia’s war which has had “devastating consequences” and will seek “just and durable peace” in line with the UN charter, international law, and principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Moscow and Beijing have opposed even including the language agreed upon during the last summit at Bali on Ukraine, jeopardising the prospect of a joint communique. When asked about India’s position on the war, Sullivan said that India had signed on to the statement.
Sullivan said that the US was deeply committed to the G20 as a forum to deliver meaningful outcomes at a time of historic international economic shocks. Linking the American agenda at the Summit with Biden’s domestic economic policy of greater investments at home, the NSA said that the US will push forward an ambitious agenda of reform of multilateral development banks, particularly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the quest to make it “bigger and better”.
