India at BRICS is a balancing force, not anti-US – Firstpost

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made an explosive statement this week when he said that the United States views India’s membership of BRICS in a very negative way because of the grouping’s obsession with de-dollarisation, something that does not go down well in making friends or influencing people in America. While Lutnick is right about BRICS’s fixation with challenging the dollar hegemony, he is absolutely off the mark when it comes to judging India’s role at the grouping. As a matter of fact, if there is one country that effectively tempers the anti-US or the larger anti-West rhetoric and agenda at BRICS then it has to be India. It is a different matter that Trump administration officials such as Lutnick may not want to engage with nuanced arguments while putting charges but even a cursory assessment of reality will prove how India is a genuinely balancing force at BRICS.

After the end of the Cold War, in the emerging geopolitical scenario of the 1990s, all the three prominent BRICS member countries—India, China and Russia—were duly following a policy of mending their respective bridges with the West. Unlike India and Russia, China had a greater advantage here because its rapprochement with the West had begun a little earlier with the famous 1972 visit by US President Richard Nixon to Beijing. For India, the world had changed drastically in 1991 with the disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union and a debilitating balance of payment crisis. India as a much-reformed economy was naturally gravitating towards the capitalist powerhouse of the world, the United States, as best captured in the visit by the then- Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao, who declared to corporate America loudly that India is now open for Business.

The firm steps of conviction that each of these countries including India, China and Russia were taking towards the west left little doubt towards their intentions. However, an interesting twist came in the late 1990s when Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov gave his famous ‘Primakov Doctrine’ that advocated for a multipolar world order to counterbalance the US particularly through a strategic triangle between Russia, India and China. Although the RIC strategic triangle has since remained a pipe dream, this coordination took a concrete shape with the establishment of BRICS in the year 2009.

Ironically, BRICS was a term that was originally coined by an American economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 to refer to the potential of emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China that according to him would even dominate the global economy by 2050. But soon this term took on a life of its own when a rising and increasingly assertive China and a revisionist Russia started using the BRICS forum to push their own alternative to a West-led world order. One of the leading examples of their efforts is the thrust on expanding the grouping to include countries such as Iran and Cuba which are one of the biggest opponents of the West-led international order.

While both China and Russia have their own agenda in using BRICS to create a geopolitical counterweight to the West, India is in a different league altogether. First, India does share the dreams of a multipolar world order with them, one where the US is not the only power to call the shots. But in order to realise this dream, it is counting only on its individual potential to rise as a formidable great power and not membership of any forum such as BRICS.

Nothing sums this up more clearly than Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement in 2024 when he categorically called for the grouping to avoid becoming an anti-West forum as it expands further. Despite having articulated several times that India is a great power in its own right, PM Modi cautioned against the grouping taking an anti-West character. This proves that multipolarity may be a cherished goal for a rising India but to achieve that it is not willing to lock horns with the West.

India’s stand on BRICS taking an anti-US stance becomes even more apparent when one takes the issue of de-dollarisation into account. Unlike Russia and China that have taken a lead in promoting de-dollarisation of the world economy, India, a rising economy, has many a times affirmed that it has no intent to undermine the US dollar or back a BRICS currency that seeks to do the same. In a speech given on the floor of Parliament early this year, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar clearly outlined that undermining the American currency was not a part of the country’s strategic or economic policy. This stand stems from the stability that India widely enjoys due to its heavy dependence on dollars for international trade, foreign exchange reserves and even remittances. India is also very aware that de-dollarisation would come with an additional risk of Chinese Yuan gaining prominence as an international currency and this is a scenario that India would never find acceptable at all.

India may have its own share of grudges with the West or even the US, including its recent experience during Operation Sindoor, but it will prefer a bilateral mechanism to register them on a one-on-one basis. For India, the scariest geopolitical scenario will be a world where China replaces the US as the hegemon. It is precisely to balance China that India has willingly signed up for the Quad initiative in the Indo-Pacific. Until India and China are locked in this geopolitical tussle, BRICS would never become the kind of forum that US Commerce Secretary Lutnick has accused it to be. In fact, India’s presence at BRICS should be seen as a relief by the Americans because it is just the kind of balancing force that they badly need.

One of the biggest achievements of India at the forum is to amplify the voice of the Global South and make it a genuinely inclusive grouping. It is time the West, especially the United States, started appreciating the role that India is playing rather than trade charges or undermine the core interests of a so-called ally.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.