If Manmohan Singh chose to travel to Germany to meet up with George W. Bush trying to slavage the nuclear co-operation deal India agreed with the US, then that's one thing. If, however, Singh decided to travel all the way to Germany primarily to attend the G8, then why did he bother? In today's world the G8 is a costly irrelevance (compared with when it all started as the G7, way back in 1975 as a fire-side chat between the leaders of what then were then the seven economically most powerful countries in the world). For a start, how can India's PM accept India being reduced in status to a mere "outreach" country while Russia, an economically far less powerful country than any of the G8's other seven members as well as China and India, enjoys full membership status? And why is the PM so keen on attending a get-together where European powers, whose global economic influence has been steadily declining since the early 1990s, are clearly overrepresented?
