Pravin Sawhney 
Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States may have been welcomed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but the global consequences of his return are likely to create more complications for India.
When external affairs minister S. Jaishankar spoke last month about the volatility and unpredictability that India’s rise in world affairs is happening amidst, he did not mention that some of the choices his government is making are contributing to this volatility. If India were to wholeheartedly support the BRICS grouping, for example, India’s rise would be peaceful and quicker – giving it both time and space to build the credible deterrence it needs to defend its interests.
Despite this reality, the Modi government has chosen to ignore the once-in-a-century opportunity of global geopolitics that has come to the Asia Pacific region where India is located. Instead, India has decided to align itself with Global North (G-7 and other industrialised) nations led by the US – which believes in balance of power politics based on military power, where security is a zero-sum game.
Evidence of this are the wars that the US waged when – in a unipolar world (from 1991 to 2017) – it was the sole great power. Buoyed by its victory in the Cold War, the US decided to selectively export its ideology of liberal democracy to create a world that deferred to its interests.
Today, the world has changed in four ways: first, instead of one great power, there are three, namely, the US, China and Russia.
Second, owing to the spectacular rise of China and some of the fastest-growing emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) in the Global South, global geopolitics has shifted from the Trans-Atlantic to the Asia Pacific region.
Third, the emerging technologies of the fourth industrial revolution building on the earlier era of digitisation are at the heart of the global geopolitical competition between the US and China – two great powers supporting opposing global governance systems.
And fourth, China and Russia are in a tight strategic embrace, not so much owing to their opposition to the US and US-based order, but because of their aligned global visions, which offer prosperity for Global South nations through connectivity, of which BRICS and the BRICS bank (New Development Bank, NDB) are prominent manifestations.
The success of the recently concluded 16th BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia is proof that the Global South nations, which comprise 80% of the world’s population, are tired of colonial exploitation and hence want to be a part of a global governance system that China and Russia are pushing.
Also read: India Belongs to Global South and That’s Where It Should Be, Not the Frontlines of New Cold War
Three things stood out at the Kazan Summit.
One, Russia is not isolated as the US-led Global North nations would have the world believe. During Russia’s BRICS presidency, 13 nations under the category of ‘partner countries’ were added to ten full members (Saudi Arabia under US pressure continues to vacillate) with voting rights.
Two, the presence of UN secretary general Antonio Guterres was evidence that the Kazan Declaration was found favourable by the top global institution to accomplish its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
And three, given China’s deep pockets, rapid strides in emerging technologies and green industries, unmatched infrastructure building expertise, indispensability in most global supply chains, and presence in some 149 out of 193 nations in the world through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it would be fair to say that without China, there would be no global conglomeration called the Global South. Russia accepts this reality, but India does not. Since this is where the problem lies, let’s understand it.
To start from the beginning, BRICS’s origin comes from RIC (Russia, India, China), a grouping created by Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov in late 1990s.
With the experience of the Cold War dynamics, Primakov understood that NATO’s eastward expansion, started in 1999 by the Clinton administration, would not stop. Gazing eastward and with Russia’s good relations with both India and China, Primakov suggested that the RIC grouping, based on mutual interest and mutual respect and with no interference in one another’s internal matters, be formed.
While all three nations welcomed the idea, only Primakov understood that in the coming years, the RIC could become a group of three big nations in a multipolar world. The Russian leader, ahead of his time, was thinking of global geopolitics to balance the US power.
Then, in 2001, an economist at Goldman Sachs concluded that the four fast growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) could dominate the global economy by 2050.
China saw in this research an opportunity for its global rise through the path of geoeconomics. Once China joined the WTO in December 2001, it took two actions: in 2002, China offered a Free Trade Agreement to the ten-member ASEAN. The idea worked and today ASEAN is China’s biggest trading partner with annual trade close to $1 trillion.
Thereafter, China saw a bigger trade and connectivity opportunity in the African continent, where it had been working slowly since the late 1960s. Today, the bilateral China and African continent trade (with 54 nations) stands at $290 billion and rising.
Thus, the RIC was assessed by Russia as a vehicle for global geopolitics, while China saw it as an opportunity for global geoeconomics.
Meanwhile, India, having conducted its 1998 nuclear tests, was fixated on closer ties with the US. It failed to rise above regional politics, where at best, it sought a de-hyphenation from Pakistan in the US’s eyes.
For India, BRIC was a side show. The strategic objective of the successive Indian governments was to cosy up to the US, since the belief was that China was deterred by closeness between India and the US. The present Modi government is no exception as far as this belief goes, never mind the transformed global geopolitics.
To go back to the narrative, once the idea of BRIC was accepted by member nations, the first meeting was held in Russia in 2009. In 2010, with the addition of South Africa, BRICS was formed and five years later in 2015 on China’s urging, BRICS got its own bank called the NDB, headquartered in Shanghai.
The purpose of the NDB was not to confront or seek to replace the Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank, but to support the EMDCs’ developmental projects with minimal conditionalities.
The 16th BRICS summit was held in Russia at a time when the US is fighting two regional wars (in Ukraine and West Asia), and most Global South nations unhappy with the US wars and its arbitrary sanctions regime were hoping for ways to displace, not replace, the US dollar and US dollar payment system. Given this, the Kazan Declaration offered at least five positives for EMDCs.
Also read | The Birth Pangs of a New World Order: Is BRICS the New Golden Child?
The first is its inclusivity. Unlike what many analysts say – that BRICS is a counterweight to the G-7 nations – the Declaration speaks of including the G-20 (grouping of both developed and developing nations) aspirations, and reforms rather than strangulating the Bretton Woods institutions created by the US-led second World War victors (developed) nations with centrality to the UN.
The second is the importance given to the RIC nations by welcoming their partnership with the African continent through the Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, India-Africa Forum Summit and Russia-Africa Summit. This showed a resolve to strengthen the BRICS foundational nations.
The third was the issue of de-dollarisation. There was worldwide speculation that Russia, whose government assets worth $300 billion were frozen under US sanctions, was working on a BRICS currency to replace the dollar. This of course would not be possible for technical, financial, political, administrative and geopolitical reasons in the foreseeable future.
While there were reports that some BRICS members were working on an exclusive payment system like BRICS Pay and m-bridge supported by blockchain digital ledger technologies, these issues appear to be still under discussion.
Putin announced at the end of the summit that there will be ‘no alternative to SWIFT’. He, however, encouraged nations to trade in national currencies through their established payment settlement systems. For example, Russia already has an established Russian Financial Information Exchange system worked by the Russian central bank.
Moreover, 90% of trade between Russia and China is being done in local currencies; Iran, heavily under US sanctions, has no problem with national currency trade; and Saudi Arabia has agreed to trade in Petroyuan alongside Petrodollar.
India, as disclosed by Russian ambassador to India Denis Alipov, has a problem not with national currency trade with Russia but with the payment system, as it worries about the US’s secondary sanctions on its banks trading with Russia.
Furthermore, given the state of the US economy, which has a trade deficit, balance of payment deficit and national debt of over $34 trillion because the US dollar is off gold and works on the floating currency exchange rate, nations, led by China, are investing heavily in gold purchase.
Thus, on the one hand, Global South nations are being encouraged to trade in local currencies; on the other hand, the dwindling US economy does not bode well for the future of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The fourth issue concerned the development of information and communications technology (ICT) for socio-economic growth and prosperity in EMDCs. This is about digitisation, which is the third industrial revolution and concerns hardware cyberspace connectivity. This involves computing and its enablers, including hardware and software as well as fibre optics cables, subsea cables, wired and wireless communication, and space capabilities.
On this issue, the Global North and Global South nations have divergent views. The Global North favours splinternet, which is a separation of US and Chinese ICT networks, since there is fear of the malicious use of ICTs by what the US calls ‘axis of evil’ nations.
On the other hand, the Kazan Declaration sought globally interoperable digital public infrastructure to deliver services at scale with opportunities for all. For e-commerce, Chinese technologies would be used to support it. Thus, overtime, it will become increasingly difficult for the nations in the two governance systems to trade with one another.
And finally, the Declaration encouraged intra-BRICS nations dialogue to take the ICTs to the next level of AI-supported industries. While desiring a central role for the UN in global AI governance, member nations have been encouraged to establish a BRICS Institute for Future Networks study group on AI.
Chinese technology would clearly play a big role in this venture. For example, China in 2024 launched a computer power corridor project whose aim is to provide high-capacity computing across China from its developed coastal areas to the underdeveloped western Gobi Desert and Tibet. Once this project gets vindicated, with China able to deliver large-capacity data transmission over long distances, it would be good for commercial applications.
Thus, China will be able to export its high-speed, large-capacity and zero-latency computing resources to the BRI nations.
Also read: India’s Innovation Deficit and How It Has Fuelled Dependence on China
India, on the other hand, has chosen to seek the US’s AI architecture through Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and so on. Since India will import 100% of hardware and AI architecture for ushering in the fifth industrial revolution, it will be out of sync with the Global South nations’ technologies. This will have an adverse impact on RIC cohesion, with India and China plus Russia at two ends of global geopolitics and emerging technologies.
Now, let’s consider Jaishankar’s statement on India’s rise amidst global volatility and instability. India had two options: to balance global geopolitical governance systems or seek opportunities through win-win cooperation in the governance system favoured by Global South nations.
India chose the first option for many reasons. It provided India the opportunity to cosy up with the US – something that all Indian governments since Vajpayee had sought to do. Never mind that global geopolitics in the unipolar world was different. Then India was a regional power, the US was the world’s premium power, and the Trans-Atlantic was the centre of global geopolitics, which it had been since the end of the Second World War.
Today, India, given its geography and huge population, is sought by all three great powers. The US wants to build India as a military bulwark against China in the Indian Ocean region, and the other two great powers want India to strengthen the RIC to bring stability to global geopolitics in the Asia Pacific soonest.
The other reason why the Modi government does not want to be wholeheartedly in BRICS is because it refuses to accept that China today is a great power and the hard power (economic, technology, military) gap between the two nations is huge and unbridgeable.
India wants to be seen in competition with China in the neighbourhood in South Asia and has expanded its definition of neighbourhood to include West Asia and ASEAN. This explains why Jaishankar says that the Modi government’s Act East policy announced in May 2014 stands vindicated by (its closeness with) the US’s Indo Pacific (strategy).
Ironically, India wants close ties with Russia, but does not want to strengthen the RIC, since normal ties with China would displease the US. Never mind that according to the Global Trade Research Institute, India’s cumulative trade deficit with China over five years is over $334 billion, showing growing reliance on Chinese goods.
Also, never mind that without normal relations with China, the three military threats – from the Line of Actual Control, the Line of Control and terrorism within Jammu and Kashmir – will continue to rise with implications for India’s sovereignty.
Further, by adopting the US’s emerging technologies, India will by 2030 have interoperability and cybersecurity problems with friendly nations of the Global South whose leader or voice India claims to be.
Why the year 2030? Because by then, it is likely that most Global South nations which are onboard the BRI would have adopted Chinese emerging technology (of the fourth industrial revolution) standards, which in turn would stabilise global geopolitical competition between the US and China.
India, caught in this great power crossfire, would, as Jaishankar said, seek its rise amidst uncertainty, instability and volatility. This is what Jaishankar calls India’s multi-aligned policy. Such a policy is fine for small nations with low populations, but not for India, which has a population of 140 crore, of whom 80 crore live in abject poverty.
If India were to strengthen the RIC, there would be peace on the two military lines and in Jammu and Kashmir. India will then rise amidst peace in its neighbourhood. The trade-off for India is to either pretend to be with China or seek cooperation in a win-win manner.
The writer’s latest book is The Last War: How AI Will Shape India’s Final Showdown With China.