New Delhi: With calls for the African Union’s full membership to the G20 getting rising momentum after backing from the US, France and China, India has also jumped into the fray with a letter circulated to members proposing to give full membership to the regional association at the upcoming summit in September in New Delhi.Official sources on Saturday night said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has “written to G20 counterparts to propose that the African Union be given full membership at the upcoming Delhi Summit of G20, as requested by them”.Currently, G20 has only one African country, South Africa. There are five countries from Europe, as well as the European Union.While the African Union chairman has been invited rather regularly to the summit gatherings since 2010, the calls for the AU to take a place at the table permanently have increased.Sengal’s president Macky Sall, current chair of AU, had proposed in July 2022 that the regional group should get a seat, saying that the absence of adequate representation from Africa could be detrimental to the G20.“The most pressing issues — climate change, pandemics, security, and debt — are ones that both affect Africa and on which Africa is in a position to contribute to solutions. Such a gap in African representation can weaken the G-20’s credibility, traction, and representativeness,” he wrote.In the run-up to the Bali summit last year, Indonesia, as the chair of the G20, had publicly called for representation by the AU, which consists of the 55 African states.During the summit in Indonesia in November 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron said that Paris “supports the full and complete integration of the African Union into the G20”.Having put AU membership as a priority agenda, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa lobbied for the proposal during the Bali summit’s working session on food and energy security.China, which had already endorsed the call for AU membership in August 2022, reiterated its support several times over the last one year.Despite the multiple rounds of public support, the 17-page Bali declaration did not have any mention of the proposal.A report by the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail from the Bali summit quoted a western diplomat that the matter of AU membership had not been on the summit’s agenda and there had been no substantive discussion of it.In spite of the setback encountered at the Bali summit, a major breakthrough ensued within a month. The United States championed the initiative for African Union membership during the US-Africa summit hosted by President Joe Biden in December 2022. “And today I’m also calling for the African Union to join the G20 as a permanent member of the G20….it’s been a long time in coming, but it’s going to come,” he said in Washington.A week later, another G20 member state, Japan also extended support for the idea of AU becoming a permanent member of the G20. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida conveyed Japan’s backing after talks with Senegalese President Macky Sall.The letter sent by the Indian prime minister to other G20 missions was described by official sources as a “bold step in enhancing Africa’s voice on the international stage and in shaping the future of our shared world”.The promotion of the Global South has been a major part of India’s branding of the G20 chairmanship. “The prime minister has led from the front on this matter, which he strongly advocates and supports,” sources added.
