Keep close track of new BRICS in the Global South wall
BRICS last week in Johannesburg, South Africa, the real drama was being played out elsewhere. On one hand, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin was virtually addressing his counterparts, there came news that a private aircraft carrying Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed in Russia, killing all 10 people on board.
On the other, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the summit that “India is now on the Moon," as India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first space mission to land near its south pole, only days after Russia’s unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the lunar surface. This divergence between Russia and India and their contrasting approaches to the world at large is what’s shaping and is likely to shape the future trajectory of BRICS as a platform.
This project emerged as part of an investment banker’s attempt to understand a global economic transformation happening in the early 2000s, but the leaders of the four nations clubbed together as ‘BRIC’—Brazil, Russia, India and China—were quick to capture the zeitgeist of the time as they came together in 2009. The emergence of this coalition as a political platform took place eight years after the initial coining of the term, when Brazilian president Lula da Silva, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and China’s president Hu Jintao accepted an invitation from Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to participate in the first BRIC Summit in Yekaterinburg.
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