India’s balancing act with the West as Brics flexes new muscles

KAZAN — For years, Western critics have dismissed Brics as a relatively inconsequential entity.

But this past week, at its annual summit in Russia, the group triumphantly showcased just how far it has come.

Top leaders from 36 countries, as well as the UN Secretary General, attended the three-day event, and Brics formally welcomed four new members — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. More membership expansions could soon follow. Brics had previously added only one new member — South Africa in 2010 — since its inception (as the Bric states) in 2006.

There’s a growing buzz around Brics, which has long projected itself as an alternative to Western-led models of global governance. Today, it’s becoming more prominent and influential as it capitalizes on growing dissatisfaction with Western policies and financial structures.

Ironically, India — perhaps the most Western-oriented Brics member — is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the group’s evolution and expansion.

India enjoys deep ties with most new Brics members. Egypt is a growing trade and security partner in the Middle East. The UAE (along with Saudi Arabia, which has been offered Brics membership but hasn’t yet formally joined) is one of India’s most important partners overall. India’s relationship with Ethiopia is one of its longest and closest in Africa.

Brics’ original members continue to offer important benefits for India too.

Delhi can leverage Brics to signal its continued commitment to close friend Russia, despite Western efforts to isolate it. And working with rival China in Brics helps India in its slow, cautious effort to ease tensions with Beijing, especially on the heels of a border patrolling deal announced by Delhi on the eve of the summit. That announcement likely gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi the necessary diplomatic and political space to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the summit’s sidelines.

Additionally, Brics enables India to advance its core foreign policy principle of strategic autonomy, whereby it aims to balance relations with a wide spectrum of geopolitical players, without formally allying with any of them.

Delhi has important partnerships, both bilateral and multilateral, inside and outside the West. In that sense, its presence in an increasingly robust Brics and relations with its members can be balanced with its participation in a revitalised Indo-Pacific Quad and its strong ties with the US and other Western powers.

More broadly, Brics’ priorities are India’s priorities.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit trumpets the same principles and goals that Delhi articulates in its own public messaging and policy documents: engaging with the Global South (a critical outreach target for Delhi), promoting multilateralism and multipolarity, advocating for UN reform (Delhi badly wants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council), and criticizing the Western sanctions regime (which impacts Delhi’s trade with Russia and infrastructure projects with Iran).

And yet, all this may appear to pose a problem for India.

With Brics gaining momentum, inducting new members, and attracting global discontent, the group is seemingly poised to begin implementing its longstanding vision — articulated emphatically by Beijing and Moscow — of serving as a counter to the West.

Additionally, Brics’ new members include Iran and, possibly further down the road, Belarus and Cuba — suggesting the future possibility of an outright anti-West tilt.

While India aims to balance its ties with the Western and non-Western worlds, it would not want to be part of any arrangement perceived as avowedly anti-West.

However, in reality, such fears are unfounded.

Brics is not an anti-West entity. Aside from Iran, all the new members have close ties with the West. Additionally, the many countries rumoured as possible future members don’t exactly constitute an anti-West bloc; they include Turkey, a Nato member, and Vietnam, a key US trade partner.

And even if Brics were to gain more anti-West members, the grouping would likely struggle to implement the types of initiatives that could pose an actual threat to the West.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit identified a range of plans, including an international payment system that would counter the US dollar and evade Western sanctions.

But here, a longstanding criticism of Brics — that it can’t get meaningful things done — continues to loom large. For one thing, Brics projects meant to reduce reliance on the US dollar likely aren’t viable, because many member states’ economies cannot afford to wean themselves off of it.

Additionally, the original Brics states have often struggled to see eye to eye, and cohesion and consensus will be even more difficult to achieve with an expanded membership.

India may get along well with most Brics members, but many new members don’t get along well with each other.

Iran has issues with both Egypt and the UAE, and Egypt-Ethiopia relations are tense.

One might hope that the recent easing of tensions between China and India could bode well for Brics.

But let’s be clear: despite their recent border accord, India’s ties with China remain highly strained.

An ongoing broader border dispute, intensifying bilateral competition across South Asia and in the Indian Ocean region, and China’s close alliance with Pakistan rule out the possibility of a détente anytime soon.

Brics today offers the best of all worlds for Delhi. It enables India to work with some of its closest friends in an expanding organisation that espouses principles close to India’s heart, from multilateralism to embracing the Global South.

It affords India the opportunity to stake out more balance in its relations with the West and non-Western states, in an era when Delhi’s relations with the US and its Western allies (with the notable exception of Canada) have charted new heights.

At the same time, Brics’ continuing struggles to achieve more internal cohesion and to get more done on a concrete level ensure that the group is unlikely to pose a major threat to the West, much less to become an anti-West behemoth — neither of which India would want.

The most likely outcome to emerge from the recent summit, as suggested by the joint statement, is a Brics commitment to partner on a series of noncontroversial, low-hanging-fruit initiatives focused on climate change, higher education, public health, and science and technology, among others.

Such cooperation would entail member states working with each other, and not against the West — an ideal arrangement for India.

These collaborations in decidedly safe spaces would also demonstrate that an ascendant Brics need not make the West uncomfortable. And that would offer some useful reassurance after the group’s well-attended summit in Russia likely attracted some nervous attention in Western capitals. — BBC