In December, India will assume the presidency of the G20, an international forum comprising the world’s twenty largest economies. It’s India’s first time chairing the group, and it represents a major diplomatic and political opportunity for the government to shape perceptions around India’s role in the world and to make headway on some of its key priorities heading into 2024, a general election year.

To discuss India’s agenda at the G20 and its approach to multilateralism more generally, Milan is joined on the show this week by the scholar Karthik Nachiappan. Karthik is a research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and a nonresident senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa. Karthik is the author of the book, Does India Negotiate?, which revises the conventional narrative that India’s multilateral behavior is prickly, obstructionist, and defensive.

Milan and Karthik discuss India’s emerging G20 agenda, its attitude toward existing multilateral institutions, and what its behavior at the recent COP27 climate summit tells us about its evolving approach. Plus, the two discuss India’s digital soft power ambitions and how those aims could conflict with international concerns about data localization.

1. Karthik Nachiappan, Does India Negotiate? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020)
2. Karthik Nachiappan, “The international politics of data: When control trumps protection,” Observer Research Foundation, October 26, 2022.
3. Arindrajit Basu and Karthik Nachiappan, “Data opportunity at the G20,” Hindu, August 18, 2022.
4. “How Rising Powers Can Make—Or Break—International Order” (with Rohan Mukherjee), Grand Tamasha, November 16, 2022.