Press Statement: September 9, 2023

New Delhi: As the leaders of the world’s powerful nations come together for the 18^th G20 Summit here, what is missing on their agenda are the issues which are paramount to people and the planet.

An attempt to bring these issues to the notice of the government in mid-August, under the banner of We20: A Peoples’ Summit on G20, organised by over 70 organisations and attended by 700 participants from 18 states, was forcefully stopped by the government, sending police. The participants represented the working class, Dalits, Adivasis, persons with disabilities, ethnic and religious minority communities, farmers, fisher-people, forest workers, hawkers, artisans, unorganized workers, academicians, and members of the civil society.

While the event was stopped by the police, people continued their discussions both offline and online. The key issues they deliberated upon included inequality, climate crisis, just energy transition, labour rights, social protection, agriculture and food security, attack on natural resources, and digital data and surveillance.

The inaugural session of the We20 Summit witnessed the coming together of academics, social, and political and people’s movement leaders, giving a clarion call to stand up to the anti-people policies of the G20.

The declaration adopted by the Peoples’ Summit strongly decried the arbitrary action of the police to prevent people from exercising their democratic right to assemble peacefully and freely express their opinions. This was in continuation with the crackdown on civil society and stifling of voices of dissent perpetuated by this regime. This was also done to prevent any other narrative on the G20 except what was published and propagated by the government. Massive forced evictions and wastage of public money on the promotion of the G20 have been the hallmarks of the event when the economy is at a historic low.

Putting the political context in place, the declaration said that the G20 events in India are being organized at a time when we are going through a phase of rising inequalities, systematic erosion of the rights of workers, farmers, fishers, Dalits and Adivasis, skyrocketing food and energy prices, extreme weather events engendered by climate crisis, widespread ecological destruction, inter-faith and inter-religious conflicts, increased violence against women and gender diverse persons, and shrinking democratic spaces.

The declaration said that this informal group of rich and ‘emerging market economies’ has taken policy decisions to serve the economic and political interests of corporations, advanced the neoliberal agenda promoted by international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the WTO, and has repeatedly failed to address the pressing concerns of people.

Addressing the climate crisis, the declaration said that the false market-based solutions to the climate crises proposed by the G20 and similar fora have resulted in financialisation of nature and deprivation of natural resource-dependent communities, and greater debt distress. It demanded immediate action to protect the environment and biodiversity through increased debt-free climate finance and cancellation of existing debts, phasing out of fossil fuels, an end to funding plastic production infrastructures and waste-to-energy plants, reducing emissions to real zero and not net zero.

It strongly condemned the erosion of democratic institutions and spaces, the attack on the constitutional values, civil society groups, human rights defenders and academic bodies, the use of digital surveillance and data privacy, the dilution of laws related to right to information, criminalisation of dissent, unjust use of government agencies to suppress peoples’ voices, and increased social antagonisms and communal tension engineered by right-wing forces.

The declaration demanded that the G20 needs to urgently acknowledge people’s voices and priorities – especially those most vulnerable to, and affected by, inequality and crises – and respond appropriately by putting people and nature over profits for a just, inclusive, transparent and equitable financial and development system and future.

Full text of the declaration.

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