BRICS’ Bandung moment

The world media sat up and took notice of the Bandung summit-like potential of an expanded BRICS. India can recover leadership of the Global South with a more positive and proactive approach and a larger vision for it, while maintaining its burgeoning ties with the West.

Last month, the ghosts of the long-interred Bandung summit of 1955 and its offspring the Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM, appeared in pages of the media in the advanced Western countries and, to a lesser extent, in India. References to those two movements could be found in reports covering and analysing the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, where issues of admission of new members, BRICS currency, non-dollar South-South trade and economic cooperation, BRICS development bank, Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and related issues were on the agenda.

The unprecedented coverage in the Western media was triggered by a substantial number of major developing countries across three continents queuing up to join BRICS as well as the proposal to develop a BRICS currency as an alternative to the US dollar. At the summit itself, six important countries were admitted.  Western commentators saw the summit as a seminal moment, potentially at least, in global affairs. Indian commentators, on the other hand, did not think that it amounted to much, for India at least.

Some leading Indian commentators like Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Swaminathan Aiyar, C Rajamohan, Indrani Bagchi and Shekar Gupta did make the BRICS, Bandung-NAM-G77 connection. They did not see an expanded BRICS trying to take over the mantle of those movements, which had attempted to promote the solidarity of and fight for the interests of newly independent countries of Asia and Africa, and the developing countries more generally, in the context of the Cold War rivalry between the two dominant global alliances, as a positive development.

In fact, the Indian government’s positioning itself over the last year as “the Voice of the Global South” to rebalance the global political and economic order in favour of the developing countries, barely found mention in a couple of their articles. They were more concerned that the new BRICS should not be taken over by China to promote its own influence in the developing world and against that of the US and its Western allies. 

On this last point, senior retired foreign service officers writing on the summit did agree, even if they did not mention Bandung-NAM-G77 at all, and the Global South only in passing. They were more focused on not allowing China to use BRICS to promote its anti-US and anti-Western agenda which might adversely affect India’s interests and its growing economic and security relationship with those nations. BJP-RSS ideologues Ram Madhav and Seshadri Chari saw the division between the developing and developed countries economically, if not culturally, as blurring, and stressed the need to keep out of, as well as balance, any antagonisms within and outside BRICS.

The Western media coverage and analyses could not have been more different. To take an example: In the first of a five-part series ahead of the summit titled “The à la carte world: our new geopolitical order,” the Financial Times saw it as part of “the seismic changes reshaping the global order,” and that “Symbolically at least…[the summit] has the potential for being seen as the 21st-century equivalent of the Bandung conference of 1955, which launched the non-aligned movement.”

It saw “the stand-off between Washington and Beijing…as presenting an opportunity for much of the world: not just to be wooed but also to play one off against the other — and many are doing this with alacrity and increasing skill.” Calling this “the multi-aligned movement,” it went on, “This new, less regimented landscape most obviously benefits the global south…Their heightened ambitions will be on display in South Africa in mid-August at the summit of the Brics nations.”

Then it identified a key development that led to the rush of the Global South countries to join BRICS and especially the heightened interest in the proposed BRICS currency now: “The signal moment for them (many middle powers who are wary of China) in the past 18 months…was the freezing (by the US) of Russian central bank reserves, which dramatically underlined once again the power of the US dollar.” In other words, there is something more important than just space created by the US-China global rivalry that is at work here.

This alienation of the Global South from the US-led Western alliance is brought out well in an article, “Why non-Western countries tend to see Russia’s war very, very differently”, by the American policy analyst Trita Parsi, which was published in April last year in the American news channel MSNBC. He writes, “But therein lies the disconnect with much of the Global South…Western demands that they make costly sacrifices by cutting off economic ties with Russia to uphold a “rules-based order” have begotten an allergic reaction. That order hasn’t been rules-based; instead, it has allowed the US to violate international law with impunity. The West’s messaging on Ukraine…is unlikely to win over the support of countries that have often experienced the worse sides of the international order.”

More broadly, the countries of the Global South are turning to BRICS to enable them to stand up against an international order sought to be imposed by the West. That order includes the West’s interpretation of human rights, free markets, climate change and environmental protection, democracy, etc., which are increasingly being seen as in the interests of the advanced countries and against those of the developing countries. Though the West’s incentives, like market access, investment and development funds, have been welcomed by the Global South, the pressures in the form of financial conditionalities and sanctions, investment treaties, regime change, and others, have been resented. It is in this context that the search for an alternative should be seen. 

However, the roots of this phenomenon go even further back. They were described well by the American analyst Fareed Zakaria, who in a well-known 2008 article “The Rise of the Rest,” wrote, “The most immediate effect of global growth is the appearance of new economic powerhouses on the scene…Imagine that your country has been poor and marginal for centuries. Finally, things turn around...You would be proud, and anxious that your people win recognition and respect throughout the world…In many countries such nationalism arises from a pent-up frustration over having to accept an entirely Western, or American, narrative of world history—one in which they are miscast or remain bit players…The fact that newly rising nations are more strongly asserting their ideas and interests is inevitable…”

It is not farfetched to see such a perspective as having led to the first BRIC summit that was held in 2009 (the S – South Africa – joined in 2010). In fact, the link between Bandung-NAM and BRICS was there all along. In an article in 2021, “Has BRICS lost its appeal? The foreign policy value added of the group,” the academic Malte Brosig noted, “Historically, the BRICS group has its normative and conceptual roots in the non-alignment movement and the Bandung Conference. The BRICS narrative, which crosscuts its summit meetings and declaration, is the critique issued against a Western-
dominated global order resembling the Bandung principles.”

At this point, a short digression to recall what Bandung and NAM were might not be out of place, since they have almost completely been forgotten in India today, except probably among those who mug up competitive exam books. Which is all the more surprising since India and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru,
in particular, played a leading role in both those initiatives. This brief paragraph in the current official US government website gives a fair
description:

“At the close of the Bandung Conference, attendees signed a communique that included a range of concrete objectives…[including] the promotion of economic and cultural cooperation, protection of human rights and the principle of self-determination, a call for an end to racial discrimination wherever it occurred, and a reiteration of the importance of peaceful coexistence. The leaders hoped to focus on the potential for collaboration among the nations of the third world, promoting efforts to reduce their reliance on Europe and North America. The Bandung Conference and its final resolution laid the foundation for the nonaligned movement during the Cold War…In the end, however, the Bandung Conference did not lead to a general denunciation of the West as US observers had feared…Nevertheless, Bandung gave a voice to emerging nations and demonstrated that they could be a force in future world politics, inside or outside the Cold War framework.”  https://history.state.gov/ milestones/1953-1960/bandung- conf

Subsequently, the Group of 77 or G-77 was formed to articulate the interests of the developing countries in global trade negotiations and the New International Economic Order, or NIEO, formulated to achieve those ends.

It was probably in the context the growing dissatisfaction of the developing countries with the West that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, after his visit to the 77th United Nations General Assembly last year, told the media, “We are today perceived very widely as the voice of the Global South. There is great frustration that these issues are not being heard.” On being asked whether India’s focus on Global South or South-South was returning in some ways to an earlier Indian foreign policy, Jaishankar asserted, “Global South solidarity has always been with us, it’s part of our DNA.” Soon after, New Delhi insider Sanjaya Baru, in an article titled “G-20 presidency is an opportunity to position India as the voice of the Global South”, wrote, “India has wisely rediscovered the South.” 

To be sure, in his 2020 book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, Jaishankar wrote, “India must be a just and fair power as well, consolidating its position as standard bearer of the global South.” And earlier, “in fact, the coming together at the BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is very reminiscent of this period [that is, of the 1950s to 70s, Bandung, NAM, the Third World, etc].” It should be noted that in the book, there is no reference to the G-77 or NIEO. And the Global South does not have the salience it has acquired over the last year. 

As a follow-up to the UN General Assembly meeting, the Indian government hosted a virtual ‘Voice of Global South Summit’ in January this year, and has taken up issues of interest to the Global South like development and widening the membership of the G20.

But the Indian response to the groundswell of support over the last more than a year in the Global South for BRICS has been uncertain and reactive. There is, of course, the need to balance support for the Global South with the burgeoning friendship and ties with the US and the West, which has many economic and security benefits. And there is the need to manage a more developed, flush-with-money and militarily strong China, especially after the deadly Galwan clash and intrusion into Indian territory, which at the present moment can probably be done effectively only with US and Western economic and security cooperation. 

India may not have the financial resources at this time to match Chinese initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and the more recent ones like the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilisation Initiative. But India has considerable experience in working cooperatively in collective organisations like the NAM and G-77 which China, focused on bilateral diplomacy, does not have. Also, China has had land and maritime border disputes with almost all its East Asian and Southeast Asian neighbours, and now probably even with Russia. Chinese economic growth seems to be faltering. And tensions with the US and its Western allies may be harming its economic and political prospects. And it is most unlikely that most of the new BRICS entrants, like its old members, would be mere pawns of China. 

But we need to go beyond seeing BRICS and the Global South through the prism of China. If we are to recover our leadership of the Global South, we need to have a more positive and proactive approach and a larger vision. We need to recover and revitalise the spirit, vision and commitment of Jawaharlal Nehru to meet the challenges of the new situation, even as we try to avoid his errors in dealing with China. We need bolder and more imaginative strategy and decisive action to deal with a situation that the Financial Times describes as “fluid.” And, most importantly, we need a coherent ideological perspective to guide strategy to lead the Global South with a common agenda and for mutual benefit in a world dominated by the US-led developed West.

(The writer is former Editor, Deccan Herald)