Much of the West still sees non-alignment as merely a moralistic posture, a cop-out, thus continuing Cold War biases. Yet, the fracturing of the global order — catalysed recently by the unpredictability of foreign policies of superpowers such as the US — has highlighted the importance of India’s commitment to the principle. When overlapping and often contradictory groupings become the norm, the flexibility of India’s posture could emerge as its strength. As the BRICS summit starts in New Delhi today,
Much of the West still sees non-alignment as merely a moralistic posture, a cop-out, thus continuing Cold War biases. Yet, the fracturing of the global order — catalysed recently by the unpredictability of foreign policies of superpowers such as the US — has highlighted the importance of India’s commitment to the principle. When overlapping and often contradictory groupings become the norm, the flexibility of India’s posture could emerge as its strength. As the BRICS summit starts in New Delhi today, marking the grouping’s 20th year, India’s foreign policy must be seen through this filter.
BRICS itself is a coalition of convenience. While China and Russia see it as a tool to challenge western institutional dominance, for India and Brazil, it is a forum for reforming a rules-based global order. Interestingly, despite their pitch for de-dollarisation, both Russia and China engage with the US, more so under the Donald Trump administration. India differs sharply from China on issues of border security and has been moving with caution on China’s idea of expansion of BRICS membership. Given this broad geopolitical landscape, a fully aligned India would not have the needed flexibility to shape BRICS debates from within while simultaneously deepening defence and technology cooperation with the US, Japan, and Australia through Quad.
This stance was most visibly demonstrated during the ongoing conflict in West Asia. India’s credibility in this space rests on an unusual asset: the friendship it maintains in the region with parties that are deeply suspicious of one another. New Delhi’s old socio-cultural and trade ties with Iran, its defence cooperation with Israel, and a strategic partnership with the UAE, encompassing energy security, a free trade agreement, and a large diaspora whose remittances matter significantly to India’s economy, are all examples of relationships that are substantive without being suffocating. India has resisted pressure both from Washington and the West Asian capitals to treat these ties as mutually exclusive.
To be sure, classical non-alignment is an anachronistic label for a fundamentally different, more fluid multipolar era, with emerging strategic needs across sectors and geographies. What India has been able to achieve, however, is an expansion of its strategic partnerships beyond the obvious regions and players. Recent deals with Belgium and Uzbekistan exemplify this. For a complex grouping like BRICS, this broadened horizon for forging ties is the only approach that works. An exclusivist run for dominance certainly does not.
It is not far-fetched to suggest that India has been internalising the Gandhian principle of empowering cooperatives into autonomously functioning decision-making blocs. Sure, Gandhi’s ideas were focused on hyper-local, village-based cooperatives and not international alliances, but the principle of more than one agent acting together for mutually beneficial outcomes remains the same. Sure, settling disputes, finding commonalities, and emerging together without being competitive are challenges with no template answers. But, all templates have been rendered useless anyway. Today, India is well-positioned to exhibit the gains of its non-aligned status — in the aftermath of the collapse of the US security guarantees in West Asia — and convey to each of its BRICS partners that not committing to power blocs may not necessarily be a bad idea in the long-term. The biggest gift of strategic autonomy is the implicit impetus to become stronger from within before making any outward gestures. India has been laying those foundations for a long time now.
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