The epochal global climate treaty signed last week would not have been possible without commitments from all the 195 countries that converged in Paris, but the role of one country — India — was crucial. India held the key to any global consensus in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the parleys held in the run-up to the UN summit in Paris, almost every big country had set itself targets to reduce emissions.India, the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, had only pledged to limit the amount of carbon dioxide per unit of GDP. Even China, the other big emitter, had promised to peak emissions.India’s resistance to set a target similar to China’s was not unreasonable. It is a big polluter because of its size and huge population, which is largely poor. To demand an emissions cap would be akin to asking India to drop its ambitions to become an economic powerhouse quickly. Given its large and as yet unmapped energy requirements due to a 300 million strong population that has no access to energy and its infrastructure bottlenecks, India cannot drop coal from its energy mix. The country has actually set a coal production target of 1.5 billion metric tons by 2020.Even when the climate change negotiations kicked off in Paris on Sunday evening, India stuck to its guns. Power minister Piyush Goyal, who was in Paris along with environment minister Prakash Javadekar, said the Western world had developed by using cheap energy from fossil fuels. "We are not at all apologetic about using coal," said Goyal.It was perhaps realising the enormity of the task of reconciling the conflicting demands of environment and development that the annual climate talks began, for the first time since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992, nearly 12 hours ahead of the formal kickoff on November 30.Through the year, the host France held two informal level meetings at the level of negotiators, three informal ministerial meetings, including the traditional pre-COP (a ministerlevel meeting just ahead of the Conference of Parties, as the annual meeting is known in UN climate lingo). There was also a lastminute whirlwind tour across the capitals of key countries — India, South Africa, Brazil, United States, Canada - by its foreign minister Laurent Fabius and the special ambassador for climate talks, Laurence Tubiana.Finally, it was time to talk. The two-week long negotiations began with a Leaders’ Event. This was an innovation; heads of state and government have always attended the climate meet in its closing days. But the French, wary of a repeat of the previous unsuccessful talks in Copenhagen, decided to change course. "We wanted to avoid the Copenhagen syndrome, when not enough had been done before and the leaders came too late to save the process," Fabius explained.The Leaders’ Event on November 30 was attended by 154 heads of state and government, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US president Barack Obama, Chinese president XI Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin. The leaders made it clear that not having an agreement in Paris was not an option, but they did not give any sense of where the compromises lay. "The leaders’ event makes failure not an option and raised the political priority on climate change ," said Michael Jacobs, senior adviser, The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.India’s critical role soon became palpable. Even so, the country was still being seen, even blamed, as an obstacle to putting the world on a path away from dependence on fossil fuels. New Delhi’s refusal to give up completely on coal, and accepting language in the agreement that made "decarbonisation" a goal was interpreted as its unwillingness to be part of a global effort to move away from fossil fuels to safeguard the planet.The narrative of India being an obstacle to the global deal gained credence outside the negotiating rooms. This was despite the high-profile launch of the International Solar Alliance by Modi and Hollande and the Mission Innovation with US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates, where too Modi was present, which were testimony to India’s willingness to look for solutions in alliance with other countries.India was not without friends. A senior Latin American negotiator said India was not being a blocker in the talks. "It is looking out for its national interests, as are all other 194 countries. That is not being a blocker." In some instances, India was working on finding "bridging" proposal to find convergence of issues.India pushed back too. It made clear that coal was not its default option. Senior Indian negotiator Ajay Mathur said solar and wind are the country’s first commitments. "Hydro, nuclear — all of these non-carbon sources are what we will develop to the largest extent that we can. What cannot be met by these will be met by coal," he said.This shadow boxing apart, talks in the "rooms" did not progress much. After a week of talks, France stepped in and took over the discussions. Releasing the first iteration of what was to become the final text, Fabius, who served as chair of the meeting, identified three issues that required resolution at the political level. One, how to reflect the difference in obligations and responsibilities of developed and developing countries, two, the provision of finance to help developing countries take steps to tackle climate change, and three, the level of ambition or increasing the efforts countries made to counter climate change.It soon became clear that the contours of the talks had changed. An ambitious agreement would require that countries like the US, China, India and the small island states remained invested in the process. The European Union, which in the past played a leadership role in the climate negotiations, was a pale shadow of its former self. "The EU is no longer a voice or force to reckon with in the negotiations. In some measure, it is because the emphasis is now on migration, and the economy," a veteran of the climate talks said.France then set up an exercise of mapping the key demands of various countries. This was evident in progressive iterations of the draft agreement. In a sense, France prepared a "take it or leave it" document, which prioritised ambition to tackle climate change as the aim. In doing so, it left it to the 195 countries to decide whether they would end up with a minimalist agreement or a durable and effective one.Much of these final negotiations took place in closed rooms, in bilateral meetings. A critical round of talks happened between the US and China. The efforts of the top two emitters resulted in breaking the impasse on key issues like a transparency mechanism for reporting on efforts taken by countries to address climate change, and on the manner in which funds were provided to developing countries.Here too, the role India played needs special mention. Despite sections within the government arguing that New Delhi should pursue a track separate from Beijing, India’s decision to work with China as part of the BASIC and the Like Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) was decisive. And it worked out to India’s advantage. The Chinese pushed back on issues like differentiation and finance while India focused on the transparency mechanism. The US pushed for a common reporting framework with flexibilities for developing countries while India stressed on the problems that such a system presents. India had argued that developing countries, even middle-income countries like itself, did not have the technical capacity to identify and report on greenhouse gas emissions from the various sectors. The bilateral meeting between Modi and Obama focused on the need to build capacity in developing countries. This dialogue, followed up with further discussions at the minister and negotiator level, resulted in the creation of a capacity building mechanism for transparency.In the end, India emerged a winner in the talks. New Delhi was able to protect its development space by ensuring the idea of differential responsibilities of developed and developing countries was embedded in the elements such as finance, transparency, efforts to reduce emissions, capacity building. New Delhi also secured a key demand for a financial provision to help meet the costs of intellectual property rights crucial in the transfer of technology.It played a key role in finalising the transparency mechanism through the four bilateral meetings between US secretary of state John Kerry and Javadekar. What set India apart from its previous efforts was the approach of the negotiating team. "There was a great deal of cohesion with the Indian negotiating team, between the minister and the officials, and between Paris and Delhi," said a member of the delegation’s support team.India emerged from Paris talks as a proactive and progressive player. Through initiatives like the International Solar Alliance, New Delhi demonstrated its willingness and ability to think out of the box in moving away from fossil fuel-based path to development. India made it clear that it was willing to look at ways in which the global effort to address the challenge of climate change could be pursued in partnership with countries without jeopardising its development push. "In a sense, Minister Javadekar was able to do all the things that minister Jairam Ramesh had wanted to as India’s chief negotiator," a veteran observer from the G-77 group of nations said.Last Wednesday, Obama spoke to Modi by phone, thanking him for the key role India played in ensuring that the climate summit in Paris was a success.(The reporter travelled to Paris at the invitation of Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA), the South Asia node of Climate Action Network, a consortium of several thousand international NGOs working on climate change and a designated UN observer organisation.)