With its expanding membership, BRICS could give greater weight to India’s preferred principles of strategic autonomy, multipolarity, sovereign equality, reformed multilateralism and stronger representation for the developing world. India, however, does not seek to replace the existing international order through BRICS, but to secure greater bargaining power within it, a report has stated.
The enlargement of BRICS strengthens India’s push for reforms in the UN Security Council, IMF, World Bank and other global institutions that do not sufficiently represent current economic and demographic realities.
At the same time, it also provides India with a platform to pursue its Global South priorities, including development financing, climate justice, technology access, food and energy security, resilient supply chains and digital public infrastructure, a report in the Sweden-based Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP) detailed.
It noted that for New Delhi, BRICS plus should not be viewed only through the prism of China’s influence, as the expanded grouping allows India to build coalitions with its new partners.
“New Delhi will host the BRICS Summit this week at a consequential moment for both the grouping and Indian foreign policy. BRICS is no longer the compact five-member forum that India helped build around the politics of emerging economies. Enlargement has given it a much broader geographic reach, greater demographic and economic weight, and an increasingly powerful claim to represent dissatisfaction with the existing international order,” the report mentioned.
According to the report, BRICS plus gives India what the original grouping could not—a broader Global South constituency. At the same time, however, it said, the expanded bloc presents New Delhi with a far more complex task of managing competing coalitions.
“India must manage China without making BRICS China-centric; preserve Russia without inheriting Moscow’s confrontation with the West; accommodate Iran’s interests without turning BRICS into an anti-Western platform; deepen relations with the UAE and other pragmatic middle powers; and engage newer members without allowing continuous expansion to hollow out the grouping,” the ISDP report mentioned.
“The New Delhi summit is therefore important less as a destination than as the beginning of a larger test for Indian foreign policy: how to make BRICS plus serve India’s multipolar strategy without allowing BRICS plus to define that strategy,” it noted.
Highlighting that expanded grouping works to India’s advantage, the report said there are strong reasons for New Delhi to view the expansion positively, noting that the original BRICS offered India an unusual diplomatic space.
It enabled New Delhi to engage simultaneously with China and Russia while deepening its increasingly important strategic ties with the United States, Europe and Japan, with BRICS plus considerably expanding that diplomatic space.
“An enlarged BRICS connects India more systematically with important states across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the wider Global South. Importantly, many of these do not see themselves as belonging permanently to either a Western or Chinese camp. That matters because India’s own foreign policy increasingly rests on precisely this rejection of binary alignment,” the report added.
