Vaichariki · Global Commentary
There is a peculiar vanity in the belief that nations must, sooner or later, choose a side. It is the vanity of a world that came of age during the Cold War and has never quite recovered the habit of binary thinking. New Delhi, to its considerable credit, has declined the invitation. It sits at the G7 table as a guest of honour and at the BRICS table as a founding member, and it has made of this apparent contradiction not an embarrassment but a strategy.
The G7, for all its grey-suited gravitas, remains what it has always been: a club of the previously ascendant, convening to discuss a world they no longer fully command. Its communiques are polished, its institutions venerable, its capital markets and technology ecosystems still formidable. When India needs capital, patents, or a seat at the table where global financial rules are actually written, it is Washington, Tokyo, and Brussels that answer the telephone, not Beijing or Brasilia. The G7’s usefulness to India is not sentimental. It is compound interest on decades of institutional trust.
BRICS offers India company. The G7 offers India consequence. A wise diplomacy collects both and confuses neither for friendship.
The Fraternity That Isn’t
BRICS, meanwhile, has the romance of the underdog and the arithmetic of the unequal. It was conceived as a chorus of rising powers and has become, in practice, a duet between Beijing’s ambitions and everyone else’s caution. China’s economy dwarfs the combined weight of the other founding members; its expansion of the bloc to include nations with little in common beyond a grievance against Western primacy has diluted coherence in the name of enlarging headcount. For India, sharing a summit table with a neighbour with whom it maintains an armed and unresolved border is not solidarity. It is vigilance wearing the costume of cooperation.
And yet BRICS is not without its uses. It is the forum where India can argue, credibly, for reform of institutions the G7 built and has been reluctant to renovate: a permanent Security Council seat, a fairer voting share at the IMF, a development bank not conditioned on Washington’s comfort. BRICS is less a family than a pressure group, and pressure groups need not love one another to be effective. New Delhi’s recent hosting of the summit, and the hard-won unanimous declaration it produced, showed that the bloc can still be made to function when India, rather than China, sets the tempo.
The Arithmetic of Non-Alignment 2.0
What India has understood, and what much of the commentary on both blocs misses, is that effectiveness is not a property of the institution but of the leverage a member brings to it. India is not powerful because it belongs to BRICS or the G7. It belongs meaningfully to both because it has, over three decades of careful statecraft, become powerful enough that neither bloc can credibly ignore it. The G7 needs India as a democratic counterweight to China and as a market too large to snub. BRICS needs India as the one member whose economic trajectory does not depend on Beijing’s patronage. This is not ambivalence. It is arbitrage.
The old non-alignment of Nehru’s era was a doctrine of principled distance, born of a newly independent nation wary of being conscripted into someone else’s war. Its contemporary successor is a doctrine of principled proximity: near enough to every table to extract what each has to offer, far enough from exclusive commitment to remain everyone’s necessary partner and no one’s dependent client. It is a less romantic creed than the one Nehru articulated at Bandung, but it has the advantage of working.
The question was never which bloc India should join. It was how long India could make each bloc believe it still had a choice to make.
Neither BRICS nor the G7 is, on its own terms, fully effective for India, because neither was designed with India’s interests as its organising principle. The G7 was built to manage a Western-led order; BRICS was built to contest it. India’s task, and increasingly its genius, has been to extract instrumental value from both projects without subscribing to either’s founding premise. That is not a failure of ideological commitment. It is the clearest evidence yet that India has stopped asking to be let into someone else’s century and started building the leverage to write terms for its own.
India does not need a bloc to believe in. It needs blocs that cannot afford to ignore it. On present evidence, it has arranged for both.