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319 Introduction What is India’s preferred multilateral global order, and how does New Delhi seek to establish it? While this remains a work in progress, several strands of India’s preference are discernible. Since the end of the cold war and the beginning of India’s own economic reforms in the early 1990s, there has been a strategic shift from nonalignment to multialignment. This shift is premised on the recognition of two factors: the emergence of a multipolar world with several distinct poles of influence and the need for India to engage with each of these poles. Second, the importance of multialignment to sustain economic growth and the need to translate this growth into political power. However, this shift, like the economic liberalization program, has remained ad hoc, inarticulate, and piecemeal. Moreover, this transition is unlikely to be linear, evident in India’s reluctant embrace of various plurilateral groupings. This strategic shift and global vision were rationalized in some detail in 2009 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In an essay ahead of the G-8 plus G-5 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, he stressed that India’s preference was for a reformed United Nations (UN)–centered system of global governance and asserted that India“will continue to strive for the reform of the United Nations to make it more democratic.”However,he candidly admitted,“efforts to reform the system have made little headway”and argued that the“unworkability of the existing structures has led to greater reliance on plurilateral groupings.”1 Thus in the global political realm, India wants to emerge as one of the key decisionmaking poles and is keen to play a crucial role as a rule shaper, especially if it can work with other groups of countries. This strategy is apparent 17 From Plurilateralism to Multilateralism? G-20, IBSA, BRICS, and BASIC christophe jaffrelot and waheguru pal singh sidhu 320 christophe jaffrelot and waheguru pal singh sidhu in India’s membership in myriad plurilateral and minilateral groupings, including the G-20, IBSA (a group formed by India, Brazil, and South Africa), the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and even the various export control cartels, such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group. At the same time, India continues to use these forums to pitch for its ultimate goal: a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). This is evident, on the one hand, in persistent calls in almost all of these other plurilateral settings for UNSC reform and, on the other, in the aborted effort to hold a UN General Assembly (UNGA) vote for similar reforms during India’s 2011–12 membership on the UNSC. However, New Delhi’s quest to reform multilateral institutions through plurilateralism faces several challenges. This chapter begins with an overview of how India is using the new plurilateral groupings, particularly the G-20, IBSA, BRICS, and other ad hoc groups, to further its interests and reform the structure for managing the global order. The following sections examine India’s role in each of these groupings in some detail, seeking to address several key questions: Does the G-20 provide India with the ideal mechanism to move from plurilateralism to multilateralism? What does India get from IBSA in terms of South-South cooperation? Will BRICS emerge as a new, post–cold war anti-West structure ? How does India continue its quest for strategic autonomy and sovereignty, while increasing its plurilateral and multilateral engagement? Can India befriend everyone and sustain strategic alliances with the United States but also with Russia and China? Or will the inherent contradictions between the various groupings and between strategic autonomy and plurilateralism limit India’s role in shaping the global order? G-20: Bridging the Gap between the West and the Rest? Although the G-20 was formally established in 1999–2000 by G-7 members, its genesis lay in the 1996 Asian financial crisis.2 However, the first summit was held only in 2008 against the backdrop of deteriorating global economic conditions . While India took little or no initiative in creating it, the G-20 was the first major minilateral group that was economically and politically relevant to India for at least three reasons.3 First, it demonstrated that the G-7 club could no longer protect the international economy from systemic vulnerabilities without including the bigger emerging-market economies, like India. Second, it provided India not only with a seat on a high table but also with the opportunity to try and...

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