India veers back to the Global South

FOR more than a decade, an idea has been in the air, that of a post-Western world order. Back then, the West was still recovering from the recession of 2009. The US was mired in the Global War Against Terror, expediently renamed ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’ after Osama bin Laden had been found and killed in Pakistan’s Abbottabad, but the Taliban were showing staying power.

In West Asia, the disillusionment with the US began when the Barack Obama administration dropped an old friend, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, like a hot potato during the Arab Spring. It was a rude awakening for other American friends and partners in the region. Cut to 2025, many believe we are already on the threshold of that post-Western world in which the United States will soon cease to be a superpower, and its unipolarity will be replaced by a more dispersed, multipolar world. All that President Donald Trump had to do in his second presidency was to turn that dream of a multipolar world into an urgent necessity, a task in which he seems to have succeeded.

Year after year, the BRICS grouping grows larger, far from a Goldman Sachs economist’s idea of a small group of four emerging economies — call it the original ‘Quad’. The Rio summit, held on July 6, showed how the BRICS has expanded from the first tentative meeting of the leaders of Brazil, China, India and Russia in 2009. South Africa joined the next year. In 2024, five new members joined — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This year, Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, entered the grouping, while Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan have been admitted as partner countries.

In the West, BRICS has been routinely dismissed as unwieldy and riven with internal differences for any meaningful joint action. Yet, this large, fractious group pulled off a 31-page consensus joint declaration at Rio, standing in stark contrast to the G7, which ended without a joint communique because the US refused to sign off on portions relating to the Russia-Ukraine war. The NATO joint communique after the Hague summit in June was a bare four paragraphs compared to the expansive document of last year’s summit in Washington, reflecting the current divisions within the trans-Atlantic security organisation.

No doubt, the 126-para document that emerged from Rio will be parsed for many days to come for Brazil’s leadership and diplomacy in forging a consensus that would have sounded impossible just days ago.

For instance, on Iran, India had distanced itself from the statement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) condemning the June 13 Israeli strikes inside Iran. Yet all, including India, have signed off on a para in the BRICS document that condemns the “military strikes since June 13 against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, which includes both Israeli and US strikes, without naming either country.

Just a few days ago, India may not have agreed to paragraph 13, reflects the world’s anger with Trump’s “liberation day” tariff war that upended the economies of many small countries along with the long-accepted notion that tariffs should not place an undue burden on developing countries. Trump is so riled by this collective show of defiance that he has threatened to impose an additional 10 per cent tariff on all the countries that participated in the “anti-US” activities of BRICS.

The irony is that barring Russia, China and Iran, most countries in BRICS would not describe themselves as anti-US or anti-West. Certainly not India, whose relations with the US are nothing less than robust, as the India-US joint statement during PM Modi’s invitation to Washington soon after Trump’s inauguration showed.

Earlier this year, India did a contrite backpedal after Trump’s threat of “100 per cent tariffs” against BRICS members if they moved ahead on a common currency plan (it does not find a mention in the joint communique). And until a few days ago, Delhi believed it could hammer out a fairish trade treaty despite Trump’s “devil take the hindmost” approach. The July 9 deadline is upon us, but an agreement is unlikely. India’s decision to sign off on the offending paragraph seems like confirmation that the trade treaty is not happening soon.

At this stage, India clearly believes it stands to gain by standing with the Global South, something it has not done at least since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in retaliation to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Even as recently as June, India abstained from voting on a resolution in the UN General Assembly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, as it had on other similar resolutions against Israel’s out-of-control rampage against Palestinian civilians that has killed over 50,000 people, and denounced as genocidal by both the ICJ and ICC. India stood out as one of the few countries in not showing solidarity with the Palestinians on these resolutions. The only exception was when it voted for a ceasefire last December, breaking with an established pattern.

Some have questioned if it was wise of PM Modi to attend the BRICS summit when the Russian and Chinese presidents stayed away. But India’s isolation post-Operation Sindoor too showed how far Delhi had strayed from the Global South in its eagerness to be seen at the world’s high table.

Observers are also puzzled by PM Modi’s five-nation, nine-day itinerary through countries whose names don’t sound familiar anymore — Ghana, Trinidad & Tobago, Namibia, besides Argentina and Brazil (for the BRICS summit). The first three are members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that Modi’s foreign policy czars are in the habit of dissing. Perhaps it was a pilgrimage of penance.

The absence of the big two — Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — gave Modi a chance to have his say. Now, BRICS has given India a statement on the Pahalgam massacre, albeit without mentioning Pakistan or the Lashkar-e-Taiba that the SCO did not.

It would be a mistake to assume that this is an either-or situation, that with this India has turned its back on the US or the West. It’s not how foreign relations are conducted. Trade negotiations with the US are set to continue. The Quad is still alive. Trump has indicated he will attend the Quad summit in Delhi. But certainly, Delhi has learnt a lesson or two about not putting all eggs in one basket, pretending that it had the world eating out of its hands. And perhaps the present leadership will stop denouncing the NAM.

Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist.

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