India has been in recent times，increasingly active as a player in global pressure groups such as IBSA，BASIC and BRIC. These have helped cement a common position within multilateral forums that puts developed country interests first and limits the susceptibility of each to the pressures that industrialised countries are known to exert，often leveraging bilateral trade and donor relationships to ensure that opposing views are banished from the negotiating table. The foundation for these groupings was perhaps laid in the build-up to the fifth ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation （WTO） in Cancun，Mexico，in September 2003. Confronted with the familiar spectacle of the industrialised countries seeking to run away with the ball by putting out pre-conference statements and proposals that reflected their exclusive concerns，India，Brazil and South Africa came together to draw up a detailed and specific list of conditions that the U.S. and the E.U. needed to fulfil in the agricultural realm，if the global trade talks were to make any meaningful progress.^[1]

The coalition held firm at the Cancun trade summit that followed and indeed，drew in a number of other countries with strong interests in terms both of protecting vulnerable smallholding peasants at home and capturing agricultural export markets. Inherent differences between Brazil，South Africa and India-not to mention Thailand，Argentina and other countries that made common cause at Cancun-made the coalition an unstable one，prone to fracture at the slightest hint of a concession to its minimum bargaining position. Yet，the obduracy of the U.S. and the E.U. on agricultural subsidies proved a powerful adhesive. The coalition of India，Brazil and South Africa came through that encounter with greatly enhanced image and credibility.

The team has since gone forward to expand its range and sharpen its focus. IBSA is now a grouping that articulates far-reaching positions of consequence to the developing world at a number of global forums. It has also become a quasi-formal political grouping with regular summit meetings at which issues of mutual interest are discussed. At its most recent summit in the Brazilian capital，IBSA agreed to jointly develop a satellite and to closely coordinate national positions on a range of issues，such as U.N. reform，climate change and the world trade negotiations.

Another grouping with quite different scope and focus emerged quite fortuitously from a far-fetched forecast by an economist in the Goldman Sachs brokerage firm in 2001. The forecast that four nations-Brazil，Russia，India and China-between them accounting for 40% of the global population and a quarter of the land area，would by 2050 be the dominant economies，supplanting all the powers of the day，proved to be irresistibly attractive. And it came at a time when countries that had been mute spectators to the unilateralist rampage of the U.S.，intent on invading a country on false pretexts，were beginning to articulate their deep misgivings.

Soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq，the Shanghai Five-a grouping promoted by Russia，China and three former Soviet republics from Central Asia，in the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 1996-was expanded to bring in Uzbekistan，and formally given the title of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation （SCO）. Though India remained tepid to begin with，in part because of the SCO’s barely concealed strategic purpose of checking U.S. hegemonic power，it has since （in 2005） signed up as an observer，to ensure that its concerns in regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan gain reasonable traction.

BRIC involved a bit of the SCO and a bit of IBSA coalescing around a nucleus of shared objectives，which have not proved very easy to identify or define. This has especially been the case sinceIndia has been cast-in its new strategic partnership with the U.S.-as a countervailing force to China’s growing regional and global influence. But in large part as a consequence of Russian initiatives，discussions among the four BRIC nations began in 2006 towards forming a formal grouping，culminating in the first official summit of the four in Ekaterinburg，Russia in 2009.

A 16-point statement adopted at the end of the summit spoke of the reform of international financial institutions as a high priority item for a more stable global order. It spoke of the imperative need to enhance the voice of the transition economies and the developing countries in the constitution of the top management councils of these institutions. And in a barely concealed reference to theunviability of continuing with the U.S. dollar as de facto world reserve currency，it called for a “stable，predictable and more diversified international monetary system.”^[2]

Given the complexity of global issues thatIndia faces，a bit of BRIC soon attached itself to IBSA，with China teaming up with that three member groupin