Run IBSA, Run

The India-Brazil-South Africa summit can prove immensely fruitful if only there is more focus on tangibly shared gains and the will and imagination to achieve them
Sanjay Kapoor Brasilia 

The imprimatur of Brasilia's legendary city planner and architect, Oscar Niemeyer, is really compelling at the Itamaraty Palace. Headquarters of Brazil's foreign office that has begun to give content to Brazil and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's regional and global ambitions, Itamaraty conveys business till you step in it. Visitors have to traipse through a long bridge over an ornamental pool replete with small islands of tropical plants to reach the grand column-free 220-square meter hall.

After attending the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) summit on April 15, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh found himself waiting in Itamaraty's imposing hall that also serves as a fascinating backdrop to courageous architectural design and avant-garde art. Despite the stifling protocols of these summits, the expansiveness of the venue and relaxed security seemed to rub on the prime minister who seemed to be in an unusually chatty mood.

When some journalists caught up with him and asked him about including China in IBSA, then he was categorical about the fact that the glue that bound the trilateral initiative was democracy. Implicit in his remarks was the fact that since China does not practise parliamentary democracy, so it has little space in this trilateral grouping. So what about Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) summit, which was to take place a few hours later? "BRIC is an idea of Goldman Sachs. We are trying to give it some shape." 

At the face of it, the prime minister may be giving greater importance to IBSA over BRIC when he said that "IBSA was coming on its own," but he seemed cognisant of the phenomenal rise of China and how it was changing equations of every multilateral forum. Although China's inclusion in IBSA may have been dismissed, but the moral quotient of IBSA, being underpinned by parliamentary democracy, seems to be misplaced when it is apparent that China is part of every other grouping of which India is a member - whether it is G-20 or BASIC.

From this standpoint, China cannot be pariah in the case of one group and acceptable in the rest. It is these existential misgivings that blight IBSA. World Bank Chairman Robert Zoellick in a recent paper that heralds the end of the third world, has questioned, the wisdom of having such groups. He talks about multiple poles of growth where new patterns of "integration combine regional intensification with global openness". His worldview provides fair space to China to do its bit to lift Africa and other poor countries out of poverty.  

Although the start of IBSA was quite tentative, it held great promise when it was conceived in 2003 by the leaders of three countries on the sidelines of UN General Assembly. Subsequently, the three foreign ministers met in Brasilia in 2003 again and came out with a Brasilia Declaration that served as a charter for future cooperation between three large democracies straddling three continents. 

The endeavour of this initiative was to ascertain whether it was possible to build on the burgeoning relationship based on trade and other issues at multilateral forums like UN and WTO. Till some differences surfaced on the issue of agriculture last year, the three countries had been coordinating action in WTO and controlling the course of dialogue in trade negotiations.