BRICS: India’s role is to ensure the grouping doesn’t get a distortionary ideological edge

As the BRICS summit begins in the Russian city of Kazan, questions about the group’s politics, positioning and potential have resurfaced. If anything, there’s a fresh urgency because this will be the first meeting of the expanded BRICS. It’s important to assess the motivations of new members. An appreciation of the Indian salience to BRICS – as a moderating voice, role model for candidate states and economic partner of Russia – is warranted as well.

What is India’s role in BRICS? The process of expansion is revealing. Every incumbent member country came with its wish list of potential newcomers. Some names overlapped, some were exclusive to one list. Notably, every single country that was admitted was among India’s recommendations. None of the other existing members could claim a similar privilege. In Kazan, as the larger BRICS now considers partner countries – from North Africa to Southeast Asia – India’s contribution is likely to be similarly influential.

Indian diplomacy is an instinctive leavening agent. In the selection of new members – and now partners – India has sought balance, geographical and otherwise, to ensure BRICS doesn’t get a distortionary ideological edge. An example is West Asia.

Contrary to the thinking of certain other members – keen to make BRICS an instrument of great power competition – India pushed multiple candidates from the region. This pre-empted BRICS expansion disturbing the equilibrium, or becoming controversial and enmeshed in West Asian rivalries.

What draws new members to BRICS? There is a possible tactical belief that membership will invite concessional developmental finance from Chinese institutions on terms less onerous than World Bank-IMF. Evidence for this is thin, but Beijing has kept alive the hope.

Strategically, many candidate countries are looking to the dexterity with which India has navigated choppy foreign policy waters in recent times. It has simultaneously strengthened relations with the US and the West, stood up to China, maintained a line to Russia, and reinvested heavily in Africa and the ‘global south’. It’s tempting to argue India’s BRICS membership is a core building block of this dexterity and, therefore, worthy of emulation.Realistically, however, rather than a source of Indian multi-alignment and strategic autonomy, BRICS membership is a symbol, or even symptom, of it. Of course, that is for other countries to discover.Finally, a puzzling mystique surrounds the economic weight and interlinkages of BRICS member states. While much of this speculation is devoid of hard numbers, India’s trade with Russia is at its heart. There is intrigue as to whether it can become a template for a broader Russian pivoting from the West to a healthy commercial engagement with BRICS countries.

The answer is not simple. There’s no doubt that Russia’s post-Ukraine war search for trade partners is making it consider Asia. It’s also true that for the moment, bulk of the benefit has gone to China, with Chinese cars replacing Japanese and German automobiles on Moscow streets. What of India? In 2021-22, the first full year of ‘normal’ post-pandemic commerce, India-Russia trade amounted to $13.2 bn (Indian imports: $9.9 bn, exports: $3.3 bn). In 2023-24, bilateral trade reached $65.7 bn. Of this, crude oil imports from Russia touched $55 bn. If you remove that oil window, overall trade has fallen.

Nevertheless, the oil basket is significant. Two queries flow from it.

Can it acquire permanence beyond the war, and even expand to a larger, multi-commodity resources bridge from Russia to an industrialising India?

Can it become a precedent for other countries to buy Russian oil and – in the words of paranoiac voices in the West – ‘fund Putin’s war’? Again, answers are complex.

India can certainly use commodities imports from Russia for its growing economy – crude oil, gas, coking coal. Beyond logistical challenges, however, Indian companies will be more comfortable doing business with a Russia that has a working relationship with the West, rather than a country that’s a harsh sanctions target.

With their exposure to Western markets, banks and financial institutions, large Indian conglomerates have traditionally been wary of flirting at the edges of sanctions regimes. This is not a value judgement, it’s just a fact. It is also unlike certain other corporate cultures – Turkiye, or even those Western companies that have seen a post-2022 export surge to Russia’s small neighbours.

India’s crude imports from Russia need to be contextualised. It’s not as if they could automatically lead to Russian crude oil sales galloping to other (non-China) BRICS countries. India has certain unique advantages in that it is a refining superpower. Its oil refineries, private and government-owned, are quantitatively and qualitatively robust. They can refine many types of crude, whether sweet or high-sulphur.

This capacity made it globally advantageous for India to buy Russian crude (strictly under the price cap) and export refined products to a variety of markets, including in the West. Western governments understood this was critical to keeping petrol prices manageable. Minus India’s refining capacities, another BRICS country that buys Russian crude will not have the ameliorative ability to soften international energy markets.

As the PM flies to BRICS, that sobering thought should stay with us.

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