The German Ambassador, Philipp Ackermann, stated on Monday (March 6) that the “Indian protocol has done fantastic work this week” and was not at fault amid a recent controversy over the foreign minister of Germany supposedly not receiving a suitable welcome when she arrived in India.
The G-20 Foreign Ministers meeting began on March 1, and the minister, Annalena Baerbock, was there to participate. On social media, a video of Baerbock landing in New Delhi by herself without a red carpet or welcome party was making the rounds. Allegations that India treated the German minister differently than other dignitaries resulted from this.
A red carpet and a line of officials are used as part of protocol to greet visiting foreign minister delegations. When a visiting minister flies their own aircraft, as opposed to a commercial flight, this occurs. Generally, the arrival is organised between the embassy of the country involved and the protocol division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nonetheless, there can occasionally be a 30-minute error tolerance in plane timing, which the protocol officers take into account.
The incident, according to the German envoy, happened as a result of Baerbock’s jet landing early. The minister was asked to wait in the plane for a while, but she ultimately made the decision to exit.
Ackermann explained to ANI that because she arrived a bit early, the German authorities ordered her to remain on the plane for a little. We had to move her to the conference centre. She ate her breakfast before deciding on the spur of the moment to exit the aircraft before the receiving queue had formed. Nothing about it follows Indian protocol. I can only reiterate how well the Indian protocol has performed this week.
The minister is not a “particularly pretentious person,” according to the ambassador, who added that he did not mind the lack of a reception line.
“The minister got off the aircraft. You may have seen it in the brief video posted on social media; she enjoyed herself, laughed, and thought it was amusing. We also received a very warm greeting. Ackermann was cited as stating, “And she’s not a particularly pretentious person, so she had no problem with this small incident.
There was always the chance of a delayed or early arrival, which might lead to circumstances where the receiving delegation was not prepared to receive the visiting delegation because several foreign ministers were arriving on the same day for the G-20 meeting.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajan, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, Australian Penny Wong, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero, and Josep Borrell, High Representative of the EU, were among the ministers who travelled to India for the G-20 summit.
On March 2, the G-20 Foreign Ministers’ conference failed to reach a consensus on a single declaration due to disagreements about the conflict in Russia and Ukraine between the US-led West and Russia and China.
Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar stated following the meeting that there were disagreements over the war in Ukraine that could not be resolved. He made an effort to stress that, with the exception of two paragraphs, there was agreement on “95 percent” of the concerns. On those two paragraphs, “nobody was on the same page,” he claimed.
