Why India is counting on G20 summit to burnish its stature

In July 1963, with the Cold War at its peak, United States President John F Kennedy felt it was far better that the leaders of the US and Soviet Union met at a summit — a term Winston Churchill coined in 1950 — than on the brink of a nuclear war. In the post-Cold War era, summitry of top world leaders, especially of the multilateral kind, is far more frequent and takes place in contexts that may seem less urgent but are politically equally nuanced.

Hosting global conferences or international sporting events, such as the Olympics, could be an effort by an emerging economy to announce it’s coming o