Summit sherpas: Borrowing the name from the high-altitude Himalayan guides, these backroom guys are on top of things

The grand tamasha of India’s G20 Summit is over but it’s left us much to talk about. How all the street dogs and slums and beggars and garbage were discreetly screened off so as not to offend the gaze of the foreign dignitaries. How flights out of and into Delhi were cancelled or diverted so that the high-level security of the visitors was not compromised. How all this proved that India had indeed achieved, if not superpower status, at least superprowess in publicising itself.

But over all this self-congratulatory back-patting there looms a question. Who were all these Sherpas who kept cropping up in media reports? Aren’t Sherpas Himalayan guides who help people climb mountains? So what were all these Sherpas doing in Delhi which has no discernible mountains to speak of, barring landfills of rubbish and construction rubble?

It seems that like the Himalayan hand-holders from whom they’ve borrowed their name, these Sherpas are the people who do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes at conferences so that the VVIPs who’ve gathered can pose for photo ops and sightsee and leave all the grind to these backroom negotiators who work out the final declaration, which shows that the whole jingbang show was a success.

And in the case of G20 2023, there was a lot of backroom Sherpa-ing to do to work out a declaration approved by all parties concerned. The big hurdle was the elephant – or the Bear – in the room that no one wanted to talk about, or rather, that different people wanted to talk or not talk about in different ways. The problematic Bear was Russia, and the assault it has unleashed on Ukraine. While the self-proclaimed Bear Master For Life Putin did not put in an appearance his apparatchik was present to ensure that Moscow was not bad-mouthed in the summing-up declaration.

While the West wanted to juxtapose ‘Russia’, ‘invasion’, ‘Ukraine’, host India, which relies on Moscow for supplies of armaments and oil, wanted to keep mum on the subject of Ukraine. And it was up to the Sherpas to navigate the slippery slope to the consensual summit of the Summit.

It was a Herculean task, which they managed to accomplish to all-round applause, with Sherpassing ease.

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