For India to matter in BRICS, it must reclaim spirit of Non-Alignment

India was NAM’s founder and, for decades, its moral centre. For small states, it meant not having to face the powerful alone. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the world became unipolar and NAM lost its compass. Many of its members, including India, drifted towards Washington. NAM survives in name; its purpose has been abandoned. On paper, it has 120 members and holds summits that few notice.

Into this vacuum has come BRICS. Formed in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India and China, joined by South Africa and more recently by Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia and the UAE, it now represents more than half of humanity and roughly a third of the world economy. The 18th Summit in New Delhi last week produced a 140-point declaration that reads, in places, like an echo of Bandung – reform of the Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO; condemnation of unilateral sanctions; an end to the blockade of Cuba; a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital; climate finance for countries that did not cause the climate crisis.

But let’s be honest, BRICS is not the heir to NAM’s anti-colonial mission. Its members have very different systems and interests, and several are close partners of the United States. That is why the declaration condemns “unilateral coercive measures” without naming who imposes them, and calls for “maximum restraint” in West Asia without naming the aggressor. These silences are the price of consensus. BRICS seeks a world with more than one centre of power. It does not seek to end domination itself. It wants to reform the dollar-centred order, not replace it, and says nothing about the debt that consumes the budgets of poor nations.

Even so, this limited project matters, and the Global South has every reason to strengthen it. When tariffs are used as a weapon and sanctions on one country disrupt the trade of many, alternatives count. Trade settled in national currencies, development finance without strings, a reserve arrangement outside the IMF – these give governments room to breathe. The more members BRICS has and the stronger its institutions, the harder it becomes for any single power to dictate terms to everyone else. Expansion, anchored in a common purpose, is not a dilution but a necessity.

Which brings us to India, the country that convened Bandung and founded NAM six and a half decades back, has now hosted the BRICS summit while behaving as a junior partner of the United States. It has deepened military and trade arrangements with Washington aimed at containing China. It maintains a strategic embrace of Israel while signing a declaration on Palestinian statehood. It has been silent on American actions against Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, and has refused to condemn unambiguously the destruction of Gaza.

Surveys across West Asia have consistently ranked Israel and the United States as the greatest threats to the region’s security. New Delhi has placed itself on the wrong side of the very region it wants to court. And before the summit, the government hid the capital’s slums behind screens. One cannot lead the Global South while dancing to Washington’s tune and hiding one’s own poor.

India has a choice. It can be one more country jostling for favours in Washington, or it can reclaim the role it once played – the moral voice of nations that were told their place in the world and refused to accept it. That means a foreign policy free of American pressure, solidarity with Palestine, opposition to sanctions and blockades, insistence that the rich countries pay their climate debt, and a push to make BRICS more than a lobby for a better seat at the table.

Bandung was never about balancing between great powers. It was about asserting the right of peoples to decide their own destinies. That is anti-imperialism in plain words, and it remains the way forward.

The writer is General Secretary, CPI(M)