Brics today offers the best of all worlds for Delhi. It enables India to work with some of its closest friends in an expanding organisation that espouses principles close to India’s heart, from multilateralism to embracing the Global South.
It affords India the opportunity to stake out more balance in its relations with the West and non-Western states, in an era when Delhi’s relations with the US and its Western allies (with the notable exception of Canada) have charted new heights.
At the same time, Brics’ continuing struggles to achieve more internal cohesion and to get more done on a concrete level ensure that the group is unlikely to pose a major threat to the West, much less to become an anti-West behemoth – neither of which India would want.
The most likely outcome to emerge from the recent summit, as suggested by the joint statement, is a Brics commitment to partner on a series of noncontroversial, low-hanging-fruit initiatives focused on climate change, higher education, public health, and science and technology, among others.
Such cooperation would entail member states working with each other, and not against the West – an ideal arrangement for India.
These collaborations in decidedly safe spaces would also demonstrate that an ascendant Brics need not make the West uncomfortable. And that would offer some useful reassurance after the group’s well-attended summit in Russia likely attracted some nervous attention in Western capitals.
Michael Kugelman is the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute in Washington
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