BRICS summit: A new chapter in India-China relations and Delhi’s global agenda?

Last week was a happening one for India, with the allegations and accusations flying from the Western hemisphere and a satisfying BRICS summit where India engaged with Russia and China

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New Delhi has to think deeper about viable and acceptable alternatives available on multiple fronts. PTI

At the end of the day, it does not matter what Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping spoke on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan—or, that is for a beginning. The very fact that they have broken the frozen ice of the past five years since their last summit at Mahabalipuram and four years since Galwan matters for those who wanted the de-escalation of bilateral tensions as an end in itself.

Of course, there were/are those that used to see a possible patch-up between India and China as a way to rationalise, if not check, the growing influence of Washington on New Delhi in geo-strategic affairs that went beyond the immediate India-China entanglement going back to the 1962 war and the preceding decade or so.

That after initial hiccups, both India and China were in constant conversation, especially at the military level, to end the impasse is on record. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar too has been interacting with his Chinese counterpart(s) on the sidelines of multiple multilateral forums, with the singular agenda point that there could be no furthering of bilateral ties in other areas until the Galwan-related issue is resolved (to India’s satisfaction). Recently, National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval, in what could be termed a rare interaction, met with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the BRICS-Plus security conference, incidentally, in Moscow.

In context, EAM Jaishankar’s Kazan call for a ‘more equitable global order’, though confined to economic cooperation, did sound as much political. That way, Kazan will be remembered for more reasons than this one. The BRICS summit came about in the midst of the Ukraine War. In the unending war, host Russia, as is known, has been entangled with neighbouring Ukraine and, by extension, the latter’s western backers, starting with the US and extending to all of Europe.

At Kazan, PM Modi had separate meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the latter’s Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian. As is known, Iran possibly waits for a full-blown fight-to-finish war with Israel, which has expanded military adversity beyond Palestine and Lebanon in the current milieu. For the record, the Modi-Putin talks outside of BRICS engagements were the second in as many months, after the bilateral annual summit in Russia.

Looked at from the outside, the Kazan summit had all the elements of an emerging anti-West consortium, into which more nations have since signed in apart from the founding five—namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, thus the acronym. More nations, big and small, rich and poor, from every continent and global political identity have applied for BRICS membership, their ideological identities, if any, no bar.

Some speculate that in an era where the West has looked the other way when Israel has declared UN secretary-general António Guterres persona non grata and attacked UN peacekeepers, time may be ripe for other nations to look beyond the UN, if not for a new global alternative. That may not happen now, as once again, BRICS has focused more on economic cooperation and interdependence. At least for now, it is not seeking any political identity—a G-78 with an economic agenda.

There are yet others who believe that China may want the BRICS on its own terms (as much as Beijing could afford) as an alternative to its Belt and Road Initiative experiment that failed owing to its desire to ‘do’ too much, too far, and too early. If so, it may flow from the Chinese realisation that it cannot do it all by itself, that too against an entrenched western system, both in terms of bilateral equations across the world and in multilateral institutions, starting with the UN and its affiliates but not stopping there.

If so, it would have to be a silent acknowledgement of China’s defeat in its BRI efforts. Whether or not Beijing thinks that way, other founding members, especially India, would want to read the Chinese mind and mentality before proceeding in the matter. Definitely, New Delhi would not want to play proxy to China, now or ever, given the complexities of bilateral relations, which are as much in the Indian street psyche as in real-time issues like the border dispute, post-Galwan distrust, and China’s Pakistan equations, among others.

Remember India’s reservations about attending the BRI launch summit in Beijing, and the picture is complete. On the occasion, India rejected Xi’s invitation as the proposed BRI highway project with Pakistan, since named China-Pakistan Corridor (CPC), was planned to run through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), which for all intents and purposes is Indian Territory in the adverse possession of Pakistan.

If these are the kind of intractable issues that haunt India-China relations, now as in the past, there is the larger border dispute, which however both New Delhi and Beijing were mentally prepared to put off until another day, pre-Galwan. While the political opposition in India is relatively silent on the Modi-Xi meeting in Kazan, once the immediate issues are sorted out and there is an element of confidence-building between their two armies, there will be revived demands in India on what went wrong in the run-up to Galwan. After all, the two leaders had held two rounds of informal summits in Wuhan and Mahabalipuram, with the joint statements overflowing with positives.

Possible rapprochement

Yet, what has made things that much conducive for Indian street opinion—which silently influences New Delhi’s policy decisions more than a relatively silent opposition—to consider a possible rapprochement with China is the more recent quarrels between India and Canada on the one hand and India and the US on the other. Sections within India that used to cheer the every-day strengthening of bilateral relations with the US and its western allies—as a bulwark against an ‘expansionist’ China that does not stick to a rules-based global order—are having second thoughts. NRIs, especially in the US, who used to be cheerleaders for the same are now left dumb.

The US initiating criminal charges against a former official of R&AW for plotting the murder of an American citizen, and Washington’s moral and political support for neighbouring Canada, which has since sacked six Indian diplomats, including the high commissioner, as ‘persons of interest’ in the killing of a Canadian citizen, have unnerved the pro-West NRI community. Among them were those who believed that an India-America ‘bhai, bhai’ was the best thing that could happen to the world after the end of the two Great Wars in the previous century and of the Cold War that followed.

Indian street opinion expects the nation’s political leadership to declare that New Delhi would act in ‘supreme national self-interest’ whenever required, the same way the US, Israel, and other Western nations have been claiming to. It is easier said than done given the complexities of the existing global scenario and evolving global order. Independent of political parties and leaders involved, India has become more dependent on the US, among other Western nations, in economic, military, and technological matters than at any time in the past.

Even as India has been talking and acting increasingly about ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ over the past years, it is at best involved in technology-transfer commitments when India made bulk purchases, especially of weapons from other nations. Today, the technological dependence on the West, both as a stand-alone affair and more so as an independent aspect of economic progress in the emerging era of AI and the like, is much more than it used to be even a decade ago.

The immediate question is if India could do without it all. Even more so, can India afford to move entirely out of the American orbit, as if out of spite, caused by the ‘two stand-alone episodes’? Those two episodes have proved that the West is not ready to treat India as an equal, even when it comes to fighting and targeting terrorism the same way the US had done Osama bin Laden in adversarial Pakistan that was leaking information like a sieve. The post-9/11 American psyche of ‘my terrorist and your terrorist’ syndrome still prevails and dominates.

Rather than looking inwards to acknowledge what was wrong with the American and Canadian systems when it came to fighting terrorism, even after receiving repeated complaints from a friendly nation like India, both had sort of begun processes that, when further twisted, could come close to beginning to brand India, too, as a ‘terrorist state’. Possibly, by now, yes, New Delhi would have understood the perils of a friendly adversary hiding in the bush better than an adversary who is open about it.

Playing second fiddle

How does India proceed from here? Can it hope to repair bilateral damage with the US and Canada on the one hand and with other members of ‘Five Eyes’, namely, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, who have joined hands to condemn India in the twin matters, and separately so? If not, where does India go from here in relations with the West, with the select exceptions of some West European nations, who, too, after a point, have problems acknowledging India’s prioritisation of terrorism-fight through the past many decades?

In this context, New Delhi has to think deeper about viable and acceptable alternatives available on multiple fronts, from investments to technology to markets, if it came to that. Or, how much can India convert the available options to one of functional and acceptable alternatives? It is more so because China, which has all of them to offer, but with a hidden rider that India and Indians can only play second-fiddle. The unsaid Chinese condition further is that even granting that political disputes, starting with the border problem, are sorted out overnight, India cannot aspire to be a stand-alone power. The choice then would only be for India to choose whose second fiddle it could and would play.

The third and possible real choice is for India to go back to the blackboard with greater determination than it had displayed at the height of the China War on the one hand and the PL-480 days on the other—to become as self-reliant as possible, but in a different era when the world has no time to wait for us to reach there. In a different era, the US, isolated and insulated from colonial Europe, did bide its time before striking big and almost for all time to come, by entering the First World War on its terms—when it finally decided to go global, grow global. The rest is history.

The alternative story of China, too, was/is no different, though the results that Beijing, especially incumbent Xi Jinping expected, may not be what it has since turned out to be. Like the forgotten Soviet Union before it, China, too, during the continuing growth story, has been trying to catch up with the US before beating it, but to no avail. Yet, there is no denying China’s phenomenal economic growth and technological advancements—including those that it might have ‘stolen’ from the West—through the past decades, first of Mao’s communism and Cultural Revolution and later Deng’s Reforms. Even in the latter phase, China only enticed the West to invest in the country’s manufacturing sector, big-time, and also transfer technology, alongside, without being asked—without verification that they would not be ‘stolen’.

Global power, superpower

India, too, went through the motions, yes, first through the slow phase of Nehruvian socialism and later through the fast-paced Reforms era, up to the present. But did India jump the gun, of believing that it had ‘arrived’ when it had a very long way to go in terms of economic prowess and technological self-reliance? Barring the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the equally secretive nuclear weapons industry, both still in the government sector, there is no industry in the country that can boast of such achievements. It is only when such unset goals are accomplished, then alone, could India become a ‘great power’. Even then, it would have to walk the talk to become a global power first and a superpower next.

Last week was a happening one, yes, for India, with the allegations and accusations flying from the Western hemisphere and a satisfying BRICS summit, which in turn may have hinted at a common alternate global currency in the place of the US dollar. The possibility, as always, might have piqued the US, and naturally so. If nothing else, the diplomatic tiffs with India might have helped the West divert at least a part of global political attention away from their failure to stop Israel on the track, and win the Ukraine War for Ukrainians, who felt cheated, deserted, and worse.

Should India bear the brunt and become a sacrificial goat for the West, specifically the Five Eyes nations led by the US, to be exploited at their convenience, whenever they need a diversion? The question has no immediate answers, considering especially that the China option is not really there, and all that India has to satisfy itself at present is the idea of further progress flowing from the Modi-Xi meeting and the possibility of BRICS, too, growing from strength to strength, where India has a greater say than what China may be willing to concede but what India’s Western allies at present may envy.

That is a long story and an arduous route, but a beginning seems to have been made, full-stop.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.