This column was originally published in Sunday Morning, a Colombo-based weekly newspaper.
India was not in the West’s favour until the early 1990s, maintaining a close and unapologetic alignment with the Soviet Union; Pakistan, by contrast, was the preferred conduit through which Western powers engaged South Asia and beyond.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991, coupled with India’s macroeconomic crisis, compelled New Delhi to undertake a strategic recalibration. What followed was a deliberate pivot towards the US, Israel, Europe, and global markets.
Today, an Indian conglomerate manages a strategic port terminal in Haifa, while India simultaneously operates and invests in the Iranian port of Chabahar. This duality is often cited as a demonstration of strategic autonomy. It is impressive, yet fragile. The pressing question is not whether India can balance competing interests, but how long such an equilibrium can endure when tolerance for ambiguity is rapidly diminishing worldwide.
A default to silence
Last week, BRICS conducted a naval exercise off the coast of South Africa, promoted as evidence of Global South cohesion and a developing strategic identity.
India, however, abstained. Its absence was quietly justified under the familiar rationale of ‘strategic autonomy,’ a formulation carefully calibrated to offend no one and commit nothing. What was presented as collective security cooperation instead revealed itself as a fragmented exercise in optics rather than substance.
BRICS was conceived as a platform for collective leverage, yet even its most modest foray into security coordination exposed profound hesitation and diplomatic caution. A grouping compelled to repeatedly explain why key members abstain from its initiatives is not exercising autonomy; it is signalling a deficit of internal confidence and coherence.
This incoherence has been most visible in moments of crisis. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who invested considerable rhetorical faith in BRICS as a geopolitical shield, was hosting a senior Chinese delegation in Caracas just hours before a rapid and technically sophisticated operation ended his hold on power.
Whether Beijing misjudged the timing, issued private warnings, or prioritised its own interests remains unclear. What is incontestable is that BRICS as a collective remained silent: no unified condemnation, no emergency consultation, not even a minimal assertion of sovereignty.
The same pattern followed mounting pressure on Iran, a full BRICS member, as it faced sustained military threats from the US and Israel. Even as limited or symbolic strikes remained conceivable, BRICS failed to offer a collective response.
US President Donald Trump himself noted that assessments emerging after his envoy Steve Witkoff’s discreet contacts with Reza Pahlavi indicated the absence of a credible alternative leadership capable of restructuring Iran’s political order.
History supports that judgement: external military coercion, however precise, cannot manufacture stability where institutional legitimacy is absent, as Iraq, Libya, and Syria have demonstrated. Yet despite the gravity of these stakes, BRICS again defaulted to silence.
Fundamental weaknesses
India now assumes the BRICS presidency at a moment when such silence is no longer neutral but consequential.
Under the current administration in Washington, multilateral norms have devolved into transactional leverage. The Trump presidency has embraced a framework in which global forums are subordinated to bilateral pressure and economic coercion.
Trump has openly derided BRICS as a “little group” and claimed it is “fading fast,” while threatening punitive tariffs against any nation perceived to undermine the US Dollar’s dominance. His rhetoric is not empty; it is a tactical warning that economic penalties will be applied to deter collective initiatives perceived as inimical to American interests. That US leverage is now exercised through tariffs rather than alliance frameworks is a defining feature of 2020s geopolitics.
BRICS’s fundamental weakness is not merely external derision; it is internal incoherence. It is neither an alliance with binding obligations, nor an economic union with shared policy instruments, nor a security pact with collective defence mechanisms. It is an expanded diplomatic forum encumbered by stark asymmetries.
Numbers are often invoked to mask this deficiency. BRICS members and partners collectively account for a significant portion of the world’s population and a sizeable share of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But population and GDP alone do not translate into collective influence when national priorities diverge sharply.
The economic data reveal this divergence with unflinching clarity. In 2025, China recorded a trade surplus of approximately $ 1.19 trillion, roughly 20% higher than the previous year, driven by a 5.5% rise in exports to around $ 3.77 trillion while imports remained flat. This outcome occurred despite a 20% drop in exports to the US following tariff measures. China compensated by expanding shipments to Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
By contrast, other BRICS members run persistent trade deficits with China. India, South Africa, and Brazil import far more than they export, hollowing out domestic manufacturing and deepening reliance on Chinese supply chains.
The US, for instance, recorded a goods trade deficit with China of nearly $ 296 billion in 2024 alone. Although that deficit has narrowed under recent policies, the imbalance remains pronounced. China’s exports to the US fell to historic lows in 2025, yet alternative markets absorbed the excess, allowing the surplus to expand further.
These disparities are not incidental; they reflect fundamental asymmetries in productive capacity, industrial competitiveness, and global value chain integration. A grouping unable to address internal trade imbalances cannot credibly claim to reshape global economic governance.
A risk of redundancy?
The paradox deepens when one considers that, despite rhetoric about reforming the international financial system, BRICS remains dependent on Western markets. The European Union and the US continue to absorb large quantities of manufactured goods, services, and high-value outputs from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Even China, despite its export surplus, remains intertwined with Western demand and financial infrastructure.
The notion that BRICS could collectively detach from the Western economic system and supplant it is not radical; it is implausible.
Meanwhile, Pakistan, India’s enduring adversary, has been aggressively expanding defence and strategic ties with multiple states, signing a formal mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia that treats an attack on one as an attack on both and deepens military cooperation beyond rhetoric, while negotiating arms and training deals with Sudan worth around $ 1.5 billion, including light attack aircraft, drones, and air-defence systems, as the country’s civil war persists.
Islamabad is also pursuing combat jet and armed drone sales with Indonesia. Pakistan’s military export surge includes at least $ 4 billion in equipment sales to the Libyan National Army, alongside talks with Bangladesh and Iraq over further fighter jet and systems acquisitions.
The Non-Aligned Movement, once a moral pole of post-colonial autonomy, has been reduced to a historical relic, marginalised not by external pressure but by failure to adapt to rapidly evolving power dynamics. BRICS risks the same fate.
A year of reckoning?
What distinguishes the present moment is that ambiguity is no longer tolerated by dominant powers.
The US, under tariff and strategic pressure, defines relationships transactionally. In this environment, strategic autonomy becomes exponentially more costly. It demands economic buffers, institutional cohesion, and credible collective backing. BRICS, as currently constituted, offers none of these at scale.
India’s presidency will be judged not by the number of meetings convened or statements issued, but by whether BRICS can act, even once, as a unified political and economic entity on core issues: trade imbalances, currency stability, sanctions, collective responses to coercion. Failure to do so will confirm what critics have long asserted: BRICS is not a counter-hegemonic project but a diplomatic forum for disparate powers seeking legitimacy without responsibility.
The year 2026 may determine BRICS’s fate. Either the bloc reconstructs itself into a disciplined, interest-driven collective capable of managing internal asymmetries and confronting external pressures in real time, or it will quietly fade, preserved only in communiqués and nostalgic rhetoric.
The world no longer requires another acronym; it requires clarity, enforceable mechanisms, and actionable solidarity. If BRICS cannot deliver these, India’s presidency will not rescue it. It will preside over its demise.
