Sep 23
“An unprecedented boost for India’s global stature,” said the Bharatiya Janata Party’s JP Nadda. “A historic milestone in bridging the global trust deficit,” said Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. ”An indelible victory mark for every citizen of our country,” said Home Minister Amit Shah.
That was back in 2023, after the ‘DelhiDeclaration’ at the G20 summit
Three years later, we have another consensus document – the New Delhi Declaration this time (here’s Devirupa Mitra on the specifics) – and much less fanfare about what it all means.
If the G20 came with “blockbuster” sideline announcements, including the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (on which we’ve written about aplenty), the Global Biofuels Alliance and the impression of having involving the domestic population in the grand spectacle of global summitry; evaluations of the BRICS gathering were decidedly less bombastic.
Ashok Malik, for example, primarily commended India for “convening even rival Persian Gulf states and drafting a statement that while admittedly a compromise… offered language everyone could take home.” Rajiv Bhatia’s conclusion was that the summit effectively demonstrated that “a believer like India and other fellow travellers remain fully invested in [BRICS].” Happymon Jacob wrote, “the media commentary has generally tended to portray the summit as a moment of great geopolitical consequence. In reality, the summit is far more modest, and the Indian agenda, quite realistically, reflects that.”
C Raja Mohan put it even more bluntly: “Delhi’s diplomatic success lies in keeping BRICS “boring”.”
BRICS Background
There is important context here, especially if you’re not familiar with the (sometimes stultifying) debates of the Delhi foreign affairs bubble. BRICS was set up in 2009 as an emerging market response to the West-dominated G7. It was originally founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, despite vast economic differences between them. It has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia and the UAE. Today it represents more than half of the world’s population, compared to just 10% in the G7. It’s share of the global economy has also seen a huge increase over the last decade.
But, as Surjit Bhalla points out, most of that increase is down to one country (emphasis added):
“BRICS went from 21.9 per cent of world income in 2011 to 28.9 per cent in 2025… Now remove China. The other ten members were 11.9 per cent of world income in 2011 and 11.5 per cent in 2025… China went from 10.0 to 17.4 per cent. It accounts for 72 per cent of the entire increase in BRICS income over the period — and because the others lost ground, for rather more than all of the increase in the bloc’s share of the world… Inside the club, the concentration is starker. China was 45.6 per cent of BRICS income in 2011 and is 60.2 per cent now. Among the five long-standing members it has gone from 54.1 per cent to 68.9 per cent.”
That’s the backdrop to the Delhi BRICS debates. Simply put, should India be member of a club that its so thoroughly China dominated, at least economically, and therefore could be used to further Beijing’s aims? This goes hand in hand with the general impression that BRICS is out to undermine the Western dominated order, a narrative that US Donald Trump has fully embraced, even as India takes pain to insist that it is a ‘non-West’ grouping not an ‘anti-West’ one.
Given New Delhi’s discomfort with China, and its hopes of building a future alongside its Western partners – whether that’s the US (India’s biggest export market), the EU (with which it just signed a big-ticket FTA) or Japan & Australia (Quad partners that fall under the ‘Western’ label) – there have been perennial worries that BRICS will be turned into a Cold War-style bloc with India finding itself on the wrong side of the divide.
This is what inspires commentary, like this by Rajesh Rajagopalan, calling on India to stay in the group in order to sabotage it (emphasis added):
“What China is attempting to do is what great powers have always done, which is use international groups and institutions to serve their own interests… No talk about multipolarity can hide the dispiriting disparity in power between China and the other members of BRICS. India is definitely not strong enough to control the group… The question then is what India can actually do, considering it is a member of a group that is—whatever India pretends—clearly anti-Western in orientation and likely to side with China on most issues… India’s purpose within BRICS then should be clear: to ensure that the group becomes nothing more than a useless talk-shop that is internally divided and an unviable vehicle for China’s great power ambitions.”
Back in 2023, Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman even argued that India should quit BRICS because of China’s domination of the club.
BRIC-a-brac
Not everyone agrees.
Some, like Gulshan Sachdeva, would like to see BRICS as a much more intentional platform for India’s foreign policy: “If New Delhi is confident about its Viksit Bharat 2047 narrative, it must also start working towards deeper trade integration within BRICS rather than settling for soft commitments and sector-specific initiatives. It should also promote an energy-centred alternative financial architecture, explore alternatives to OECD DAC development architecture, and develop a BRICS connectivity strategy.”
Few others see any likelihood of BRICS increasing Indo-China cooperation, even as the summits offer a useful platform for the leaders of the two countries to meet without having to expend political capital on bilateral gatherings. The more general read is that India will seek to preserve BRICS for a relatively fuzzy set of goals, none of which would be achieved were New Delhi to step away.
As Aparna Pande puts it, “for India, [BRICS’] value lies in its versatility. It is broad enough to amplify its voice, flexible enough to preserve strategic autonomy and divided enough to prevent any one member, including China, from easily dominating it.”
Rishap Vats goes further, arguing that India shouldn’t have to apologise for its membership in the grouping and can actually look to China’s own experience joining Western-dominated multilateral institutions as a template for how to operate:
“Despite its growing integration with US markets, and the obvious asymmetry between the two, it was rising US unilateralism that pushed China to start joining regional groupings to blunt American order-building in Asia…. India’s participation in BRICS] does not automatically reinforce China’s leadership claims, in Asia or in the Global South. Its absence certainly would…
China’s strategy of displacement in the post-Cold War era was not simply about joining regional organisations for limited material or social rewards. It was also about undermining US leadership in Asia and complicating American involvement in the region, not because it expected to close the power gap soon, but precisely because it could not yet do so… Indian strategy should not be frightened into letting every so-called contradiction decide the outcome.”
From a European vantage point – given the announcement of Canada as an ‘associate member’ of the European Union (without clarity on what that means) and the launch of the ‘Partners for Multilateralism’ grouping at the United Nations – the BRICS summit and India’s positioning within it offer some view of what a newer order with middle-power agency (even if neither the EU nor India loves the term ‘middle power’) might look like.
Lizza Bomassi and Ummu Salma Bava write (as before, emphasis added):
“This is what makes India’s BRICS presidency interesting. It is not simply another demonstration of New Delhi’s ability to balance competing relationships… It also raises a broader question of whether India’s ability to operate across competing institutional environments could serve a wider purpose: keeping channels of communication open across political divides and helping workable ideas circulate between them. The goal is not necessarily convergence but to prevent differences from becoming more permanent forms of separation…
This is a potentially useful way of thinking about the next phase of multi-alignment: not only as a means of preserving strategic autonomy but also as a means of creating a kind of connective tissue across divides. The implication is not that countries should be trying to join every grouping available to them. Institutional presence is, by itself, probably insufficient. But in a fragmented ecosystem, some countries may have genuine value precisely because they have the credibility and diplomatic network to operate across political clusters.”
(Whether all of this will work for BRICS now that China has the presidency over the next year is a whole other matter, raising big questions for India over the coming 12 months as well).
‘Boring’ Bharat
India as the connective tissue for global conversations across divides would, of course, not be a new formulation for anyone familiar with the history of New Delhi’s foreign policy. But it’s a few steps removed from the ambitions on display in 2023, when India sought to present itself as a pole in a multipolar order, rather than a bridge across divides.
Remember, those were the years of IMEC and the Indo-Pacific, Modi as the ‘vishwaguru,’ and “War rukwa di, papa”, and a time when “foreign policy was on the ballot.” Of course, 2024 was also the year that Modi’s electoral machine sputtered. And while Trump’s return to the White House was initially seen with enthusiasm in New Delhi, subsequent events have revealed just how little India’s interests matter to Washington, DC, and how limited its reach is, even in its own ‘extended neighbourhood’, as with the Gulf war.
As Kate Sullivan de Estrada wrote on CASI’s India in Transition, New Delhi has turned to free trade agreements to make up for the lowered global salience of the Indo-Pacific, which brought it so much attention over the previous decade. And, in a piece we just published on IiT, Abhinandan Kumar points out that the BRICS summit was handled very differently from the G20, suggesting “a more selective approach to international summitry that is shaped by altered geopolitical circumstances and the limits of reproducing diplomatic spectacle indefinitely.”
India’s Ministry of External Affairs is quite familiar with the task of carrying out the ‘boring’ work of quiet diplomacy, pushing forward the trade files and painstakingly organising summits. But, after a decade in which India’s foreign policy was increasingly presented as a series of Modi’s personal achievements, what would a more ‘boring’ strategy mean for the prime minister?
In an essay for Carnegie’s series on ‘the Populist Turn in Middle Power Diplomacy, Sandra Destradi looks at the Indian case:
“Continuous domestic political mobilization—the ongoing effort to rally public support—is a key feature of populist politics, including in India. Populist politicians do not confine mobilization to election campaigns; instead, they seek to continually activate and enlarge their constituency even after assuming office…
Modi has used India’s engagement in international institutions as a vehicle for domestic political mobilization by explicitly linking his personal leadership to India’s rising global stature…
A massive campaign elevated the rotating presidency into a symbol of foreign policy success, with the G20 logo—depicting a globe embedded in a lotus flower, the BJP’s party symbol—displayed prominently across the country. Rarely has the connection between domestic political mobilization and international diplomacy been so visible…
By presenting himself as both the authentic voice of the people and as a globally respected statesman, Modi links external recognition to national pride. Global visibility is reframed as collective recognition of India, and the resulting sense of pride feeds back into political support for the leader who claims to have delivered it.”
Free trade agreements (which are complex and can have messy outcomes) and quiet bridge-building are much harder to transform into domestic status building, however, which may be why Modi had to find some notes in his BRICS speech that would allow for a bit of chest thumping (click to see the coverage across Indian media):
Churumuri @churumuri
One nation, One weaponisation Newspaper headlines of the BRICS tamasha in Delhi show what foreign affairs reporting really is: glorified stenography. @MEAIndia #WhatsApp
So, is the future of Indian foreign policy more ‘boring’, after the heady rushes of the early 2020s when India’s perennial future superpowerdom seemed once again just around the corner? And what does that mean for Modi, as he prepares for the mid-way point of his third term in power?
Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdhjm7ak
