India took a nuanced stand on BRICS expansion

K. P. Nayar

Strategic Analyst

WISER by the experience of previous summits, India took a nuanced stand in Johannesburg last week on the expansion of the BRICS group. “India fully supports the expansion of the BRICS membership. And welcomes moving forward with consensus on this,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the organisation’s 15th summit before the expansion was agreed on. Enlargement was the biggest challenge at the Johannesburg summit. It can be a game-changer for the international order, which is seeing convulsions that were unimagined at the dawn of this decade.

Once six more countries were offered membership, PM Modi went to great lengths to dispel the impression that India was being the spoilsport on enlarging BRICS. “I am pleased that our teams have come to an agreement on the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures for expansion,” he said. Criteria and consensus were Modi’s two watchwords during phone conversations with several of his counterparts in recent weeks and at the Johannesburg summit. At the core of his arguments was India’s firm belief that “this step (phased expansion) will further strengthen the faith of many countries in a multipolar world order”. One of the fundamentals of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s diplomacy is the promotion of a multipolar world order. “And based on these (criteria), today we have agreed to welcome Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates into BRICS,” PM Modi said in a statement within minutes of the summit’s consensus on expansion. At least two dozen more countries are in the queue to join BRICS. During Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra’s pre-summit media briefing, everyone lost count of their number. “Somebody mentioned 40, 23... a large number of countries have expressed interest in the expansion of the BRICS,” Kwatra said without mentioning a precise figure.

With 46 years of diplomatic experience behind him, Jaishankar relies heavily on his institutional memory and on the archival resources of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in advising PM Modi on foreign policy. In April 2010, at the second BRIC summit in Brasilia, India alone blocked the move to include South Africa. That summit’s host, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, without due diligence, assumed that there would be no opposition to South Africa’s admission to BRIC. He invited that country’s then President Jacob Zuma to Brasilia, in preparation for South Africa’s entry. However, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dug in his heels and said the nascent group should first consolidate itself before expanding. Zuma, all decked up like a bride, had to return home early and empty-handed. But he had the last laugh.

On the eve of the summit, a volcano in Iceland named a mouthful Eyjafjallajökull violently erupted, spreading ash all over western Europe, forcing most countries on the continent to close their airspace to passenger aircraft. When the time came for the Indian Prime Minister’s special aircraft to ferry Manmohan Singh home from Brasilia, Air India flight 001 had nowhere to go. Anand Sharma, then Minister for Commerce and Industry, offered to arrange the PM’s return home, rerouting AI-001 via South Africa. Sharma is married to a South African and had received a special award from that country during the sesquicentennial celebrations of the first arrival of Indians in South Africa. So, the VVIP flight, on which this columnist was part of the media contingent, landed in Johannesburg on the night of April 16. In sweet revenge for spurning his country’s application to join BRIC, Zuma arranged almost his entire cabinet to line up at the airport to greet PM Manmohan Singh, notwithstanding the inhospitable hour of his stopover.

Zuma’s gesture, however, fell flat. The Special Protection Group (SPG), which guards Indian Prime Ministers, would not allow the PM to deplane because the Johannesburg airport had not been security-cleared as per their manual. While South Africa’s cabinet ministers twiddled their thumbs on the tarmac of their own airport, the SPG, after much toing and froing with its local counterparts, allowed South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Emily Nkoana-Mashabane — whom Singh was well acquainted with — to board the Air India plane and greet the Prime Minister. During the eight years that remained of Zuma’s tenure, his relations with New Delhi soured. Meanwhile, China amassed goodwill in Pretoria and Johannesburg — the executive and legislative capitals of that country, respectively — by successfully paving South Africa’s way into BRICS when President Hu Jintao hosted the organisation’s next summit on the island of Hainan a year later.

Modi went the extra mile last week to make sure that such wrong-footed Indian diplomacy was avoided in BRICS. He made no attempt to disguise his reasons. “India has deep and historic relationships with all these countries (which have been newly admitted to BRICS),” the Prime Minister said in his post-expansion statement. “With the help of BRICS, we will also add new dimensions to our bilateral cooperation,” he added. Enlightened self-interest is at the root of a change in tactics from 2010, rather than a foundational commitment to BRICS as was the case with Manmohan Singh. Of the six new entrants, India has very strong bonds with three —the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran. New Delhi is attempting to deepen relations with a fourth one, Egypt.

For a long time, Washington’s attitude to BRICS was to ignore it altogether. It changed its tactics last week as some of the closest allies of the US decided to jump on the emerging bandwagon. President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is now leading the charge from the White House to underplay the expanding group’s relevance, although it has 40 per cent of the globe’s population and a quarter of the world’s GDP.

“We are not looking at the BRICS as evolving into some kind of geopolitical rival to the US,” Sullivan said in a conference call with select journalists. He is hoping that differences within BRICS will make the group fall apart as it expands. “This is a very diverse collection of countries in its current iteration, with Brazil, India, South Africa’s democracies; Russia and China as autocracies. With differences of view on critical issues. We will continue to work on the strong positive relationships we have with Brazil, India and South Africa,” he said. Sullivan is looking for Trojan horses inside BRICS. India should be vigilant and on its guard.

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