FOR A COUNTRY WHICH prioritises football, carnival and samba over statecraft and diplomacy, a goof-up over the “family photo”of leaders at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro last month was not surprising.
Protocol in Brazil has been customarily so lax that when Pope Benedict XVI visited Brazil in 2007, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held the pontiff by his arm. Last year, Lula again discomfited believers around the world when he embraced Pope Francis during a visit to the Vatican. The hug reverberated through the conformist Vatican media. Ever since anyone can remember, the Catholic pontiff is shown respect by the laity by kissing the ring on his right hand. Touching his holiness is a strict no, no unless the pope initiates physical contact. It has been the same with British monarchs. Lula ignored protocol and defied tradition, risking the ire of Catholics in Brazil, whose number outranks the faithful in any other country.
On the final day of G20, it was not until the heads of state and government assembled against the stunning backdrop of Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain and Lula, the summit’s host, took his central place before the camera that someone realised that three important world leaders were missing: US President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and her Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau. There was never any official explanation for the fumble, but in all probability, it was the usual Brazilian laxity in such matters that eventually necessitated a reshoot later in the day. There are reports that it was the first time in G20’s history that leaders had to be reassembled for a second photo shoot.
Summit group photos are precious mementos. But no such photo is more sacred in multilateral diplomacy than the one taken annually during the UN General Assembly. The ritual began in January 1946 when the first General Assembly convened in London. With only 51 leaders then, it was a routine, if memorable picture. Since then, the UN’s membership has grown to 193. Taking their group photo has grown into a huge pictorial, logistical and diplomatic challenge. Those who insist that the UN has failed should consider how it fits into a camera frame more than 200 people, including senior UN staff. All of them have tightly-packed itineraries during their late September week in New York, but no one misses the group photo. Brazil’s inability to get two dozen people for a photo shoot stands out in stark contrast.
It is a time-honoured diplomatic practice that countries which host multilateral meetings plan elaborate programmes for spouses while the leaders are discussing weighty global issues. Brazil is different. It rarely bothers about spouses accompanying leaders to their country. When prime minister Manmohan Singh went to Brasilia in 2010 for two plurilateral meetings, Lula’s government left all the accompanying spouses high and dry for two days. Fortuitously, Ratna Prakash, wife of the Indian ambassador, had planned a backup which exposed Gursharan Kaur to facets of Brazilian life, which very few Indian visitors come across. Brazil has a long way to go to catch up with India as a host of multilateral summits.
The author was a foreign correspondent in Washington.