Professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University Rajesh Rajagopalan scandalously opined in a piece last month that “India’s real objective should be to make BRICS ineffective”. In his assessment, “If it becomes an effective group at all, it is likely to become one that China will use to promote its interests and isolate India, and to undermine India’s main partners in the Indo-Pacific.” He accordingly advised that India ensure that BRICS is “internally divided” and nothing but a “talking shop’.
With all due respect to Rajagopalan, his understanding of BRICS is divorced from reality. The extreme asymmetry that already exists within BRICS ensures that it’ll never achieve anything more than alternative institutions in the financial, insurance, and other related domains of international commerce and perhaps a currency conversion unit for sidestepping the dollar. To be sure, these would be significant achievements, but they’re not the same as a common currency or other game-changing proposals.
As was explained in September 2024, “BRICS Membership Or Lack Thereof Isn’t Actually That Big Of A Deal” since “BRICS can be compared to a Zoom conference”. That’s because “members actively participate in talks on financial multipolarity, partners observe their discussions in real time, and everyone else with an interest in them hears about the outcome afterwards.” BRICS Summits rarely achieve anything of tangible significance for this reason and that’s okay. Here are three briefings about it:
* 21 May: “Korybko To Toloraya: A New Group Is Required To Fulfill BRICS’ New Proposed Functions”
* 10 September: “Korybko To Fabiano Mielniczuk: There’s A Misunderstanding, Not A Crisis, Within BRICS”
* 11 September: “Korybko To Bordachev: Multi-Alignment Is The New Non-Alignment”
Unlike how Rajagopalan made it seem, India isn’t the only BRICS member that doesn’t want their voluntary network to become a Chinese-led anti-Western bloc. In fact, China isn’t even anti-Western in the way that he portrayed it since the BRICS Bank in Shanghai complies with the West’s anti-Russian sanctions, some Chinese companies do too, and China still sells drones to Ukraine. Even if China was how he portrayed it, all BRICS members except for Iran and perhaps Russia oppose this vision of BRICS.
While it’s true that some of their officials and media surrogates hyped BRICS up as an anti-Western bloc, that was just for maintaining morale among non-Western populations amidst the partial restoration of US-led unipolarity upon its exploitation of the Ukrainian Conflict to that end. The reality has always been that BRICS is just a voluntary network whose members share ideas for accelerating financial multipolarity with a view towards empowering the non-West to collectively but gradually reform global governance.
Returning to Rajagopalan, the premise upon which he advised India to “sabotage BRICS” in defense of its national interests vis-à-vis China is therefore false since BRICS has always been a “talking shop” whose members are “internally divided” due to their extreme asymmetries, but that’s not a bad thing. Its existing purpose in brainstorming ways to accelerate financial multipolarity and possibly one day create more alternative institutions is very useful, and these functions veritably advance Indian interests.
