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Evolving strategic bilateral ties

India's relations with key Brics members have grown despite its Western alliances

7 min read
Updated On: Aug 10 2026 | 5:00 AM IST
Mohammad Asif Khan
Brazil's Minister of Foreign Affairs Mauro Vieira, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and South Africa Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola during the Brics foreign minis

Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mauro Vieira, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and South Africa Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola during the Brics foreign minis

Brics, now a grouping of 11 countries, was built to push back against Western dominance of the global economy. However, India, a key founding country, is walking on a tightrope, balancing its ties with the member states and the West. Twenty years into the grouping, one of the clearest way to see that challenge is through India’s relationships with three of its Brics partners: Russia, Brazil, and South Africa.
 
Russia remains India’s most entrenched Brics partner. More than 90 per cent of trade between the two countries is now conducted in national currencies, one of the bloc’s clearest practical wins.
 
“For Russia, the upcoming Brics summit in New Delhi is an important opportunity to strengthen multilateral cooperation grounded in the principles of sovereign equality and mutual benefit,” Victoria V Panova, head of the Brics Expert Council-Russia, said.
 
“The position of Russia, China, and India, as well as all the Brics altogether, is centred on a constructive agenda: we do not set ourselves in opposition to any groups of countries but rather propose solutions that make the global economy more resilient and inclusive,” she added.

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Defence remains the cornerstone of the relationship. Russian-origin equipment still accounts for 60-70 per cent of India’s military arsenal. Russia has emerged as a top oil supplier since the war in Ukraine.
 
However, India’s most delicate task is managing its multiple strategic relationships without being forced into binary choices. It has alliances with Western partners, such as the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) and the I2U2 framework (a strategic partnership with the United States (US), Israel, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)), as well as relations with Brics.
 
“So this is not ‘bloc versus bloc’; it is about ensuring that more states have the freedom to pursue their development strategies in a stable, predictable environment,” Panova said.
 
However, it has not been seen this way by the US or the larger West. US President Donald Trump has described Brics as an explicit, hostile “attack on the dollar” that was intentionally “set up to hurt us”.
 
“The US administration has clearly signalled its lack of faith in interdependence, which is inherent in economic collaboration among nations, and the relevance of multilateral institutional arrangements nurtured over the past several decades,” Jayant Krishna, senior fellow with the Chair on India and Emerging Asia Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.
 
“I hope India can play the balancing act between the might of the West and the aspirations of Brics,” he added.
 

Natural ally

India is not alone in balancing ties with Brics countries and Western allies. Brazil, another founding member and last year’s Brics chair, tried not to provoke the US, but failed.
 
“Brazil maintained a low-profile Brics summit and pointed very clearly that Brics was not an anti-West group and did not want to discuss issues such as de-dollarisation,” Ana Saggioro Garcia, adjunct professor at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, said.
 
This tension was evident in the divergent responses to US tariffs. While Brazilian President Lula da Silva advocated for a joint Brics response to American trade aggression, India’s approach instead focused on resolving the tariff issue through its bilateral relationship with the US.
 
“Trump hit Brazil with very high trade tariffs. India, later, could negotiate a trade deal with the US, but Brazil still could not. So Brazil’s strategy of keeping a fly under the rudder did not really work,” she added.
 
Brazil and India have been natural allies within Brics since both have resisted turning the bloc into an anti-Western platform. Before Brics, India-Brazil ties lacked weight. Bilateral trade was modest at $3.8 billion in FY 2008-09. Brics changed that by giving them a framework to work together consistently.
 
Today, trade has crossed $12.23 in FY2023–24 billion annually. At the World Trade Organisation, India and Brazil have coordinated on agricultural subsidies and intellectual property rights. Both continue to push for United Nations Security Council reforms.
 
Brics has given these bilateral relationships a more common strategic purpose. For example, the relationship with South Africa before Brics was through the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) trilateral forum, launched in 2003 alongside Brazil.
 
The grouping gave both countries a platform to coordinate on UN reforms and climate change before Brics even existed. India-South Africa bilateral trade has grown from $4.5 billion in FY 2008-09 to roughly $19.25 billion in FY 2023-24. South Africa’s minerals, platinum, chrome, and coal feed the Indian industry. Nearly a million strong Indian diaspora in South Africa provides a cultural and economic bridge.
 
South Africa’s inclusion in Brics in 2010 was partly driven by India’s support. The IBSA framework continues alongside Brics, a reminder that India’s ties with South Africa were never dependent on the larger bloc.
 
Apart from the bilateral relationships, the bloc has delivered concrete gains. Over 65 per cent of intra-Brics trade settlements now happen in national currencies. Brics-supported institutions have approved billions in loans for Indian infrastructure, metro systems in Chennai, Indore, and Mumbai; the Delhi-Meerut RRTS (Regional Rapid Transit System); and clean energy projects in India
 

Multi-alignment

Today, Brics as a group has expanded from five to 11 members, with Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE joining in 2024 and Indonesia following in 2025. But views within member states remain fragmented on core political matters; for example, the Brics Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in May failed to produce a joint statement because of differing positions on West Asia, the status of Gaza, and navigational rights.
 
Garcia also points to Brics’ record of ineffectiveness: “Brics was not successful, for instance, in trying to contain Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022. Brics was not effective during the pandemic, trying to cooperate and to build a common agenda.”
 
“India would seek to leverage its presidency of this 11-nation bloc to strike an equilibrium between managing the mandate of Brics nations while maintaining its strategic ties with Western nations, especially the US,” Krishna said. India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has described this approach as a doctrine of “multi-alignment”.
 
India has defined four pillars for Brics under its 2026 chairmanship: resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability, under a “Humanity First” approach. The key priority areas are payment and settlement arrangements, transport and logistics corridors, and cooperation in technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and digital public infrastructure.
 
India will host the main summit in September. It hosted the Brics energy ministers’ conference on June 25-26 in Gurugram, Haryana.
 
“We can expect India to take the lead on several concrete tracks: payment and settlement mechanisms that reduce dependence on external financial infrastructure. Indian initiatives around Aadhaar-linked UPI, inclusive Artificial Intelligence governance and blue-economy cooperation show that India wants Brics to be associated with practical solutions,” Panova said.
 
While India has many areas of potential cooperation with Brics countries, its main challenge will be finding a common ground among members with divergent national and strategic interests.
 
“One of the main challenges Brics has now is how to rebuild itself with a group that has gone from five members to 11 full members. Brics decides everything under consensus, which was already very hard under the five original members. It is now even harder with the new members,” Garcia said.
 
Whether that common ground exists and whether India can find it are the questions that now hang over the Brics presidency.
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Written By :

Mohammad Asif Khan

Mohammad Asif Khan is a Senior Correspondent at Business Standard, where he covers defence, security, and strategic affairs.
First Published: Aug 10 2026 | 5:00 AM IST

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