Not another BRICS in the wall
BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, that started yesterday will discuss many things. It will, however, focus on membership expansion from five members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — to a much larger group. South Africa has invited 67 countries to the summit of which 53 are African.
South Africa hopes to ultimately make BRICS an African-majority group. Where it can claim to be the leader.
China strongly favours expansion, seeing a chance to convert BRICS into an anti-Western front by inducting countries dependent on Chinese aid and investment. This is a major threat to Indian interests that must be combated.
BRICS was invented by Goldman Sachs as a group that global investors should invest in, and it was little more than an investment fad.
These were the five emerging markets with the largest populations — and, hence, political influence — in four continents. The countries in question found the acronym irresistible. So, BRICS became a political group.
Its main achievement has been the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB), which finances infrastructure projects. This has made billions of dollars of loans. But they add up to a pinprick in global finance.
However, this helps expand China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Chinese imperial ambitions are not in doubt. At a 2010 Asean regional forum meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi bluntly declared that Asean members were small countries and China was a big country, and that was simply a fact of life.
To combat these dangers, Indian diplomats must keep the following points in mind at the BRICS summit:
Oppose reckless expansion in search of numbers. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) began with a few members focused on
