ANTHONY BUTLER: Brics is on sandy India-China border soil

After suggestions that India’s Narendra Modi might only attend the August meeting virtually, India has now said Modi will be attending in person

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

04 AUGUST 2023

While South Africans have been preoccupied with the theatrics of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his now-disembodied participation at the upcoming Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, SA) summit in Johannesburg, the real action has been taking place elsewhere.

In a foreign policy scare for SA earlier this week, the Hindustan Times suggested that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was considering only virtual participation in the August 22-24 meeting. After a reported phone conversation between Modi and President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday, the Indian government said that Modi would be attending in person after all.

The uncertainty about Modi’s plans was merely the latest manifestation of a deterioration in China-India relations that is likely to define the future direction of the Brics grouping.

Bric acronym inventor and former Goldman Sachs boss Jim O’Neill has lamented numerous disappointments with the grouping.

“Having created the Bric acronym to capture the collective potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China to influence the world economy”, he recently observed, “I now must ask a rather awkward question: When is that influence going to show up?”

Rather than collectively dominating the global economy by 2050, as O’Neill, in 2001, speculated might be possible, it is just two individual members, China and India, that have really grown. Between 2008 and 2021, China’s real GDP per capita rose almost 140% and India’s by 85%. Russia, Brazil and SA have essentially stagnated over this period.

As generators of resources for an insatiable Chinese economy, the three weaker members are in different ways deeply dependent on China for geopolitical influence and future economic prosperity. India, in contrast, is China’s potential future rival as an economic and political superpower.

Three issues are bringing incipient conflict between the two most populous Brics countries to the surface.

First, the border conflict between China and India has escalated. Clashes over the past three years along the countries’ 3,000km contested border have resulted in deepening militarisation and a hardening of positions in political systems legitimised by rabid nationalism.

Chinese expansionism

Second, India hopes to counter Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific region. An Asian simulacrum of Nato, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“Quad”) between India, Japan, Australia and the US, signals a deeper and wider rebalancing of India’s international relationships in favour of the US and its allies — and away from China.

Third, since 2020 China has pushed hesitant Brics partners to take concrete steps towards expansion, with this month’s summit in Sandton intended to set out criteria for the selection of new members — and perhaps even to indicate the likely candidates.

Like ostensible “de-dollarisation” proposals, this represents an optimistic or even romantic forward projection that anticipates a future role for Brics as an alternative locus of authority to Western-led institutions.

Given the current configuration of Brics, however, it is likely that the choice of candidate countries, and the immediate interests served by such an expansion, will be those of China and, to some degree, an otherwise embattled Russia.

India’s foreign policy establishment has been quite comfortable with Brics as a platform to showcase the country’s cherished and sentimental role as a nominal leader of the developing world. The candidate countries that China anticipates admitting in the enlargement process may well take Brics in a quite fresh geopolitical direction, one that runs directly counter to India’s longer-term interests.

When Brics leaders gather in person or virtually at the Sandton forum later this month, speculation will intensify about behind-the-scenes disagreements about expansion. Some observers already suspect a stalemate — or even the exercise of India’s effective veto powers.

Sceptics will claim that growing tensions between the two Brics countries with real or potential superpower status marks the beginning of the inevitable end for this once-promising international alliance.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.