BRICS is the future India should embrace for the sake of its people
Pravin Sawhney
Speaking at the Asia Society in New York on 25 September 2024, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar said that India’s rise would be amidst volatility and unpredictability. This is not inevitable. If India was to wholeheartedly support the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) grouping where being a prominent Global South nation, as well as its foundational member, India’s rise would be peaceful and quicker with time to build credible deterrence.
Surprisingly, no one has questioned the Modi government on why it has chosen to ignore the once-in-century opportunity of global geopolitics which has come to the Asia Pacific region where India is located? And why India has decided to align itself with Global North (G-7 and other industrialised) nations led by the US which believes in balance of power politics based on military power where security is a zero-sum game? Evidence of this are the wars that the US waged when in the unipolar world (from 1991 to 2017) it was the sole great power. Buoyed by its victory in the Cold War, the US decided to selectively export its ideology of liberal democracy to create a world that deferred to its interests.
Today, the world has changed in four ways: One, instead of one great power, there are three great powers, namely, the US, China and Russia. Two, owing to the spectacular rise of China and some of the fastest growing Emerging Markets and Developing Countries (EMDCs) in Global South, the global geopolitics has shifted from Trans-Atlantic to Asia Pacific region. Three, the emerging technologies of the fourth industrial revolution building on the digitisation of the third industrial revolution are at the heart of the global geopolitical competition between the US and China--two great powers supporting opposite global governance systems. Unlike the balance of power politics, China (and Russia) support development, prosperity, indivisible security, win-win cooperation with mutual respect, and above all, the United Nations-based international law and global order.
And four, China and Russia are in a tight strategic embrace, not so much owing to their opposition to the US and US-based order, but because of their aligned global visions of prosperity for Global South nations through connectivity of which BRICS and BRICS bank (New Development Bank) are prominent manifestations.
The success of the recently concluded 16th BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, is proof that the Global South nations which comprise eighty percent of world population are tired of colonial exploitation and hence want to be a part of the China and Russia supported global governance systems.
Three things stood out at the Kazan Summit.
One, Russia is not isolated as the US-led Global North nations would have the world believe. During Russia’s BRICS presidency, 13 nations under the category of ‘partner countries’ were added to 10 full members (Saudi Arabia under US pressure continues to vacillate) with voting rights, disappointing lots of nations who had queued up for a berth in the grouping.
Two, the presence of UN secretary general Antonio Guterres was evidence that the Kazan Declaration was found favourable by the top global institution to accomplish its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
And three, given China’s deep pockets, rapid strides in emerging technologies and green industries, unmatched infrastructure building expertise, indispensability in most global supply chains, and presence in some 149 out of 193 nations in the world through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it would be fair to say that without China there would be no global conglomeration called Global South nations. Russia accepts this reality, but India does not. Since this is where the problem lies, let’s understand it.
To start from the beginning, BRICS’ origin comes from RIC (Russia, India, China), a grouping created by Russian foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov in late 1990s. With the experience of the Cold War dynamics, Primakov understood that NATO’s eastward expansion, started in 1999 by the Clinton administration, would not stop. Gazing eastward and with Russia’s good relations with both India and China, Primakov suggested that the RIC grouping based on mutual interest and mutual respect and with no interference in one another’s internal matters be formed. While all three nations welcomed the idea, only Primakov understood that in the coming years, the RIC could become a group of three big nations in a multipolar world. The Russian leader, ahead of his time, was thinking of global geopolitics to balance the US power.
Then, in the year 2001, an economist at the US’ Goldman Sachs firm concluded that the four fast growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) could dominate the global economy by 2050. China saw in this research an opportunity of its global rise through the path of geo-economics. Once China joined the World Trade Organisation in December 2001, it took two actions: In 2002, China offered the Free Trade Agreement to the 10-member ASEAN. The idea worked and today ASEAN is China’s biggest trading partner with annual trade close to USD one trillion. Thereafter, China saw a bigger trade and connectivity opportunity in the African continent where it had been working slowly since late 1960s. Today, the bilateral China and African continent (with 54 nations) trade stands at USD 290 billion and rising. Thus, the RIC was assessed by Russia as a vehicle for global geopolitics while China saw it as an opportunity for global geoeconomics.
Meanwhile, India, having done the 1998 nuclear tests was fixated on closer ties with the US. It failed to rise above regional politics, where at best, it sought a de-hyphenation from Pakistan in the US’ eyes. For India, BRIC was a side show. The strategic objective of the successive Indian governments was to cozy up to the US since the belief was that China was deterred by closeness between India and the US. The present Modi government is no exception as far as this belief goes, never mind the transformed global geopolitics.
To go back to the narrative, once the idea of BRIC was accepted by member nations, the first meeting was held in Russia in 2009. In 2010, with the addition of South Africa, BRICS was formed and five years later in 2015 on China’s urging, BRICS got its own bank called New Development Bank (NDB) headquartered in Shanghai. The purpose of the NDB was not to confront or seek to replace the Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank, but to support the EMDCs developmental projects with minimal conditionalities.
The 16th BRICS summit was held in Russia at the time when the US is fighting two regional wars (in Ukraine and West Asia), and most Global South nations unhappy with US’ wars and its arbitrary sanctions regime were hoping for ways to displace, not replace, the US dollar and US dollar payment system. Given this, the Kazan Declaration offered at least five positives for EMDCs.
The first is its inclusivity. Unlike what many analysts say that BRICS is counterweight to the G-7 nations, the Declaration speaks of including the G-20 (grouping of both developed and developing nations) aspirations, and reforms rather than strangulating the Bretton Woods institutions created by the US-led second World War victors (developed) nations with centrality to the UN.
The second is the importance given to the RIC nations by welcoming their partnership with the African continent through Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, India-Africa Forum Summit, and Russia-Africa Summit. This showed a resolve to strengthen the BRICS’ foundational nations.
The third was the issue of de-dollarization. There was worldwide speculation that Russia, whose government assets worth USD 300 billion were frozen under US sanctions was working on BRICS currency to replace the dollar. This of course would not be possible for technical, financial, political, administrative and geopolitical reasons in the foreseeable future. While there were reports that some BRICS members were working on an exclusive payment system like BRICS Pay and m-bridge supported by blockchain digital ledger technologies, these issues appear to be still under discussion.
President Putin announced at the end of the summit that there will be ‘no alternate to SWIFT.’ He, however, encouraged nations to trade in national currencies through their established payment settlement systems. For example, Russia already has an established Russian Financial Information Exchange system worked by Russian bank. Moreover, 90 per cent of trade between Russia and China is being done in local currencies; Iran, heavily under the US sanctions has no problem with national currency trade; and Saudi Arabia has agreed to trade in Petroyuan alongside Petrodollar. India, as disclosed by Russian ambassador in India Denis Alipov has a problem not with national currency trade with Russia, but with the payment system as it worries about US’ secondary sanctions on its banks trading with Russia.
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