The grouping of nations under the acronym BRICS is in expansion mode with mortar as it were, with the induction of six nations from a longer list of 22 prospective countries wishing to join the new voice of the Global South. While India, with its presence in the Western alliance of Quad, may have begun to get the feeling that it is the outlier in this alignment of diverse autocracies and democracies, it should consider itself fortunate to have a foot in each camp and hope to enjoy the best of both worlds.
A more immediate benefit of being in such a multilateral grouping as BRICS was the opportunity presented for a significant meeting between the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which India could freely express its most pressing concern of tensions in a three-year long unresolved LAC situation that has had an unsettling effect enough to seem like an existential crisis.
While living with contradictions seems a natural enough corollary of the new millennium, India has enjoyed the best of ties with Mr Vladimir Putin’s Russia despite the latter’s brazen disdain for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Even so, it would be in India’s greatest interest to seek a solution to the most recent realignment of the LAC.
That is, if China’s army is seen following up on its President’s commitment to speed up the disengagement and revert to the pre-April 2020 positions, which is how India interpreted what President Xi reportedly said. It matters little who initiated the dialogue so long as what was spoken about the need for peace on the border gets translated into positive action.
A passing reference to the LAC may have been made on the sidelines of a dinner meeting last year in Bali between the two leaders, but Chinese intransigence had led to a series of talks among the military brass ending in a stalemate that has lasted far too long.
It remains to be seen if China will walk the Xi talk in disengaging, first in Depsang and Demchok, and a return to peacetime positions. If indeed the situation resolves satisfactorily in disengagement and de-escalation despite the variations in perspective of what was said by the two leaders, the Xi-Modi meeting at the Johannesburg summit will be remembered for long if it leads to the desired outcome of total peace on the LAC.
To serve its greater strategic aims in its BRICS presence, India will, however, be competing against the clear enough intentions of China and Russia to make it a non-Western bloc willing to take on the latter’s might and its dominant position in terms of internationally traded currencies and funding for universal development through the World Bank and the IMF.
India has close ties with at least four of the six countries — UAE, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — that will be joining BRICS first, but there is no denying its lower level of importance and influence in a bigger grouping as compared to China with its prominent Africa initiatives and its debt diplomacy despite its own faltering economy.
A larger grouping under the BRICS umbrella would make sense if there were to be a constructive commonality of purpose in attending to the enormous disparities and other issues. A voice for the Global South gaining cadence through forums like G-20 and BRICS is to be welcomed though it may not happen without a degree of hegemony to the new order in which China will be the dominant player. But India has a voice that will be heard in both camps.
