Express View: For India, is BRICS worth it?

Indian Express

3 hours ago

The 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ended over the weekend with a wide-ranging declaration on global and regional issues. But few outside the hapless desk officers in various foreign offices around the world and policy wonks in think tanks would want to pore over the 126-paragraph, 47-page, over-16,000-word declaration. With such familiar phrases as 'multipolar world', 'Global South', 'inclusive', 'sustainable' and 'global governance', it will certainly impress the enthusiasts who see BRICS as a powerful instrument to upend the global order. Many in the West do fear BRICS for the same reason. There is no reason to believe that US President Donald Trump would have had the time to read the long declaration, but he has repeated his earlier claim that BRICS is 'anti-American' and threatened to impose additional tariffs on members of the forum.
But the hopes and fears of BRICS engineering a global transformation are misplaced. For, the forum is riddled with several contradictions of its own and its grasp has always been larger than its reach. As irony would have it, if anyone is trying to build a 'post-American order', it is Trump. In less than six months, he has overturned many traditional assumptions about US global policies and is seeking to radically overhaul the international system that Washington built after World War II and that was modified by it at the turn of the 1990s. Consider, for example, the BRICS talk about reforming the Bretton Woods system; Trump is doing precisely that by pressing for change at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The BRICS call to save the World Trade Organisation is a sad (and hypocritical) cry in the wilderness with Trump well on his way to demolishing the rule-maker for world commerce. Even more damaging is that leading members of BRICS have been queuing up in Washington to negotiate bilateral deals with Trump holding a gun to their heads. They are not saving the WTO but protecting their own national trade with America by looking for bilateral deals. China has cut a limited deal. Vietnam, another communist country, announced a trade deal of its own. India hopes that its intensive trade negotiations with Trump's Washington in the past few months will bear fruit this week.
Equally far-fetched is the idea that members of BRICS can submerge their bilateral differences to collectively blunt American dominance. For India, the economic and security challenges presented by China are much bigger than those posed by American hegemony. Two BRICS states — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — are as worried as Israel and the US about the nuclear weapons programme of a third member, Iran. But here is the rub. Trump's actions to overhaul the global economic, financial, and security order have produced great global churn. The Rio declaration has no answers, only hot air, in response to the Trump challenge. The circumstances that persuaded India to found BRICS and promote it for three decades are no longer present. Yet the political groupthink in Delhi is so entrenched that no questions are asked about the virtue of India investing so much political and diplomatic capital in a forum that does little to serve the country's current interests. With India taking over the chair of BRICS, the time to ask those questions is now.