India Successfully Withstood Western Pressure To Invite Zelensky To September’s G20 Summit

The West would of course have been happy had India sacrificed its national interests by inviting Zelensky to the event and thus derailing its plans to promote issues of importance to the Global South, but it was always a political fantasy to imagine that Delhi would comply with this wishful thinking expectation.

Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar put speculation about Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s appearance at this September’s G20 Summit to rest by confirming during a press conference on Thursday that no invitation was sent to him. It’s recently become fashionable among many in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) to accuse India of being the US’ Trojan Horse in Eurasia, but this claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, especially not after the EAM’s latest statement.

If there was any truth to that theory, then India would have at least invited Zelensky to participate in this upcoming summit, where he’d be given a global platform to bash Russia. It proudly rebuffed Western pressure to have this happen, not to mention their demands to condemn Russia at the UNSC and then sanction it, since doing any of these would have betrayed the basis of its multi-alignment policy. Taking sides in the New Cold War would sacrifice India’s strategic autonomy, which it wants to avoid at all costs.

Even though it cooperates with the US to manage China’s rise, India won’t fight on its side it if those two ever go to war, which South Asia expert Ashley J. Tellis informed the American elite about in his detailed article for the Council on Foreign Relations’ official magazine in early May. Although some ideologues in the US’ policymaking bureaucracy still cling to the false hope of forcing India into vassalhood status, it’ll never happen as most recently proven by it declining to invite Zelensky to the G20 Summit.

To be clear, India didn’t intend to offend Ukraine or the US by this. For starters, there’s no reason for Zelensky to participate in the first place since his country isn’t part of the G20. Second, it’s not the US’ place to pressure anyone to extend him an invitation to their events, which EAM Jaishankar clarified wasn’t even discussed anyhow. And finally, inviting Zelensky would have distracted from India’s agenda of promoting Global South causes during this summit.

The West would of course have been happy had India sacrificed its national interests by inviting him to the event and thus derailing its plans to promote issues of importance to the Global South, but it was always a political fantasy to imagine that Delhi would comply with this wishful thinking expectation. Honest observers who follow its foreign policy knew better than to waste their time speculating about this since it would have contradicted India’s principled neutrality towards the NATO-Russian proxy war.

Those in the AMC who are under the false impression that India is the US’ Trojan Horse in Eurasia should therefore recalibrate their worldview in light of it declining to invite Zelensky to the G20 Summit. That would have been the very least that it could have done as a favor to the US if any such relationship between those two secretly existed like those folks suspected. The very fact that it didn’t happen should inspire them to learn more about Indian foreign policy as it objectively exists.