BRICS no longer matters

The emerging-market grouping has failed to retain relevance

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the virtual summit of the BRICS nations under the presidency of the People’s Republic of China, focused on co-operation between the five countries with regard to the post-pandemic recovery and increasing mutual investment. Although virtual, the summit will not have been an entirely comfortable experience for Indian officials. The grouping has become increasingly dominated by Chinese interests, with Moscow even more dependent on Beijing following its Ukraine invasion. Russia is an autocracy, but even democratic South African intellectual and policy-making circles have been the target of Chinese influence efforts and increasingly toe Beijing’s line. At the same time, Sino-Indian relations have been irreparably damaged since the 2020 Galwan clash. PRC President Xi Jinping may have been ostensibly referring to the Ukraine situation when he declared “expanding military alliances and seeking security for oneself at the expense of the security of other countries will only lead to a security dilemma”. But Beijing’s diplomats will have known that this reflects language that it has used in the past against the Quad, and will undoubtedly be seen as unnecessarily provocative by India. Beijing sought to use the summit to launch its new “global security initiative”, but given that India’s major security threat remains cross-border terrorism financed and supported by elements in the Pakistani establishment, which is propped up by Beijing, any notion of common security considerations naturally sounds ridiculous.
 

Even shared objectives on economic development, which were long the glue binding together members of the BRICS, are no longer comfortably shared between India and the other BRICS members. While other members of the grouping, with economies that have become primarily commodity exporters, are dependent on the Chinese market and thus subsidiary to the Chinese economy, India still views itself as a potential economic competitor. Thus its trade and economic friction with China has also grown in the past years. Within the BRICS, China’s outsized growth has meant it basically wields disproportionate power. This may not have been the case when the grouping was conceived two decades ago — but in that period, only China’s economic growth has been high and consistent, with the other BRICS members underperforming for years at a time, and thereby falling further behind.

Put together, it is clear that the BRICS grouping is likely past its prime. There is no reason to minimise participation, of course. It is a bad idea to stop talking — particularly when one-to-one meetings might prove politically fraught, there is every reason to keep regular, larger groupings like the BRICS summits going. But it would be foolish to expect the grouping to live up to its potential as an emerging market counterweight to, say, the G7. Mr Modi is attending the G7 meeting in Germany in person as an observer this week, and there is little doubt that decisions taken there will be of greater relevance to India’s development trajectory than anything decided at BRICS. The broader hope of the emergence through BRICS of an alternative set of development- and growth-focused norms, or of an alternative geo-economic order centred on the needs of emerging economies, must now unfortunately be put aside. The relevance of BRICS in the medium, or even longer term, to India is now minimal.