Strategic hedging in a turbulent world

India is represented in several other groupings. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) is lying dormant but has not been disbanded. The effort to promote another regional grouping that excludes Pakistan has turned the focus on Bimstec (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), which groups together India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka from South Asia, with Myanmar and Thailand from Southeast Asia.

A more overt security grouping in the South Asian region is the Colombo Security Conclave, which brings together India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. There is an initiative to revive the India, Brazil and South Africa (Ibsa) forum, which went into hibernation after its last summit in 2011. It was projected as a forum of three vibrant democracies in the developing world. On November 23 last year, the sixth Ibsa summit took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazil President Lula da Silva, and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa pledged to cooperate together on a range of issues in groupings such as the G20 and Brics.

But no summit appears to have taken place on the sidelines of the New Delhi Brics summit.

Further afield, India is part of the East Asia Summit, which brings together the 11 Asean countries, along with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the United States (US), and Russia.

The Quadrilateral (Quad) entered later, first convened in 2007 and then revived in 2017 under US President Donald Trump after it lay in hibernation for a decade. It brings together India, Australia, Japan and the US in a security-oriented grouping but it has developed a more varied agenda, encompassing technology, public health, and disaster relief.

India does not see any contradiction in being a member of the SCO as well as the Quad, but others do. China and Russia have often dubbed the Quad as an Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) while Western countries see the SCO as being anti-West. On its western flank, India is a member of the I2U2, which is a grouping of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the US and came into being after the signing of Abraham Accords in 2020, normalising relations between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. India is at pains to emphasise that these are not military alliances targeting any specific countries or groups of countries. These are platforms for mutually beneficial cooperation, which may include security but not directed against any identified adversary.

India is also a member of trilateral groupings, like one with Australia and Indonesia and another with the US and Japan. A new trilateral featuring India, Australia and Canada has been announced.

The question may be legitimately posed: What have been the outcomes of these numerous circles of consultation and cooperation in expanding India’s economic, technological and commercial interests? Have these expanded India’s diplomatic space and enhanced its security?

India has looked upon membership of these varied groupings as confirming its regional and global profile. While these groupings have ambitious agendas, India does not have the qualified human and material resources to follow through with substantive implementation. They serve as useful consultative mechanisms and platforms for engagement but the bandwidth to follow through on the large number of recommendations they make is thin. One often finds that a report on some item of cooperation from a previous meeting is often followed by a pledge to hold even more consultations. The same agenda items may reappear at successive meetings though couched in different language. This becomes apparent when one compares the declaration issued by the Brics summit in Rio de Janeiro last year and the one issued by the subsequent summit in New Delhi. There is a more direct connect between effort and outcome in the context of bilateral relations. In a grouping of several states, the results may be more amorphous.

This is the reason why summits of such forums seem to focus more on bilateral meetings among leaders on the sidelines rather than on the plenary meetings. At the SCO summit in Tianjin last year, the spotlight was on the meeting between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping and on their holding hands together with Russian President Vladimir Putin. These bilateral meetings overshadowed the summit itself.

The several forums that India participates in provide useful opportunities for meetings among leaders of countries which may have difficult or tense relations for one reason or another. Likewise, a well-publicised handshake with the leader of a friendly country at such a forum may be used to underscore the strength of the relationship. These are achieved without a dedicated exchange of visits, which would have a much heavier political charge.

In a geopolitical context, India’s participation in such multination groupings serves its long-term interests in making a multipolar world a reality. During the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement (Nam) brought the constituency of developing countries that had newly thrown off the yoke of colonial rule, to create a relatively independent political space in a polarised world of competing military and ideological alliances. While its members lacked both economic and military muscle, Nam exerted considerable moral pressure and was in the forefront of the struggle to establish a more just economic and security order. The movement also played an important role in the norm-setting and rule-making processes at the United Nations (UN). The landmark UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982, is testimony to the role played by Nam in international rule creation. India was one of the founder members of Nam. Its establishment was announced by Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana at Belgrade in September 1961. The inaugural conference was attended by the leaders of 25 developing countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America. In subsequent years, the membership went beyond a hundred. Though Nam lost much of its relevance at the end of the Cold War in 1991, it has been reincarnated in the more amorphous concept of the Global South in our present day. This history makes it clear that such groupings, even if they are loosely structured, clearly fulfil a useful geopolitical purpose. One may call such groupings “circles of safety” for otherwise relatively weak developing states against pressures from more powerful states.

Brics plus goes beyond this circle of safety role. It is more ambitious. It is global in scope. Its enhanced profile is precisely due to the significant economic, military and technological capabilities of its key members, including India, China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, which are the original members; and Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, Iran and Indonesia, which are the new members. Saudi Arabia has been invited to join but it has not formally acceded to doing so till now. This expanded group of 10 commands 40 per cent of world gross domestic product and about 25 per cent of global trade. China, its leading member, is the largest economy in the world after the US, and the largest trading power, constituting 15 per cent of global trade.

More importantly, intra-Brics trade has been growing steadily over recent years, from 10 per cent of the trade of the members in 2015 to 25 per cent at present. The Brics Development Bank, set up in 2015, has now become a leading multilateral development bank. Since its founding, its cumulative lending has reached $43 billion. There is a Brics Contingent Reserve Facility of $100 billion, which member countries can draw from in the case of difficulties in the balance of payments.

During the recent past, especially after a wide range of economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and European countries after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China and Russia have tried to promote the idea of a Brics currency, a Brics settlement mechanism for financial transactions, and a Brics payment system to run in parallel to Society for Worldwide International Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). However, these have been resisted by countries like India, which are wary of attempts at “de-dollarisation” and being drawn into a China-dominated currency and financial order. The Brics summit in New Delhi settled for a more modest goal of promoting trade in local currencies

and exploring the linkage of digital payment systems, like India’s Unified Payments Interface, Brazil’s Pix, and China’s Alipay or WeChat pay. India already has such arrangements for retail payments with several countries in Southeast Asia and with the UAE. The Indian proposal to consider a linkage among Central Bank Digital Currencies of those Brics countries that have developed such currencies did not find traction.

If the word count of the Declaration reflects the scope of cooperation among the Brics countries, then the 140-paragraph New Delhi Declaration must constitute a record. But substantive cooperation reflected in the document is rather thin. Most of the paragraphs project consultative engagement rather than practical implementation. Given the diversity of the grouping, the differences in their political orientation, and even competitive interests, this is not surprising. However, the very fact that they have come together on the same platform as major powers, with shared interests in shaping the existing West-dominated international order, is significant. They are not threatening to overturn the existing order but are putting in place alternative institutions and processes that will eventually contribute to a multipolar order.

Brics is taking some initial steps in that direction.

The Indian fear is of a Chinese capture of Brics as a vehicle for the assertion of its expanding power and profile. Its strategy is to work with China in areas of convergent interests but also to resist its overtly anti-US and anti-Western agenda. Hence the assertion that for India Brics represents the “non-West” but is not anti-West.

How should we assess the Brics summit hosted by India?

One, Indian negotiators displayed high professionalism and diplomatic skill in obtaining a consensus Declaration, reconciling the positions of Iran and the UAE, which are adversaries in the ongoing conflict in West Asia.

This repeated the success India had achieved at the G20 summit in Delhi in 2023, reconciling the Western and Russian positions on the Ukraine War.

Two, the summit avoided projecting Brics as an overtly anti-US and anti-Western coalition, thereby preserving its equities with its partners in the West. However, the Declaration does not shy away from criticising unilateralism and economic coercion, clearly pointing to the US.

And three, even though the summit was short on concrete and practical outcomes, the range of domains chosen for engagement and cooperation is impressive and has the potential to make Brics a significant player in the global economy and in shaping the new technological regulatory regimes. As countries with significant technological capabilities, Brics has something to bring to the table.

The building blocks for a truly multipolar world order are in sight and the multiple circles of engagement are expanding India’s strategic options in a shifting geopolitical landscape.