BRICS and "One Family": The Transformation of Indian Perceptions

BRICS is a dynamically evolving framework that has undergone significant transformation over the years: its membership has expanded, its institutional structure has become more complex, and attitudes toward the grouping among its key participants, including India, have changed.

India itself has also changed, with several governments coming to power during this period. Although it is generally believed that a foreign policy consensus exists among India’s elites, allowing New Delhi to maintain a stable course in world affairs regardless of which political force wins national elections, the transformation of India’s political and socio-economic realities, together with broader global developments, has gradually altered the Indian leadership’s perception of BRICS.

The very concept of BRIC emerged during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Vajpayee was regarded as an intellectual and belonged to India’s elite, while his foreign policy was characterized by boldness rooted in confidence in India’s capabilities and its bright future. Under Vajpayee, the Indian economy began to accelerate thanks to reforms carried out a decade earlier by Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. In the brave new world that was taking shape before everyone’s eyes, the creation of BRIC appeared to be a bold and inevitably successful bid for future dominance by emerging economies seriously intent on displacing the aging Western hegemon. In the eyes of India’s leadership at the time, BRIC embodied the political and economic transformation of the world order. Neither Vajpayee nor his partners in the format sought to damage relations with the United States first, but they demonstrated calm confidence when Washington initiated confrontation—for example, by imposing sanctions on India after its nuclear tests. BRIC gave the Indian government greater confidence and expanded the boundaries of what seemed possible.

By the time BRIC was finally established, both political power and foreign policy priorities in India had changed. Having lost the elections, the BJP left office, and Manmohan Singh of the Indian National Congress became Prime Minister. Singh was considered an even subtler intellectual than Vajpayee. He had earned widespread recognition as the architect of reforms and the creator of modern India’s economy (having served as Finance Minister in Narasimha Rao’s government), yet he was also a compromise figure with limited political authority. Throughout most of his premiership, Singh focused on improving relations with the United States—not least because New Delhi had become increasingly concerned about Beijing’s growing assertiveness in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean region, where China launched a series of initiatives that would later evolve into the Belt and Road Initiative. This concerned Washington as well, and by leveraging American anxieties, India gained a genuine opportunity to attach itself to the locomotive of the U.S. economy, especially given the dependence of India’s IT sector on developments in the American high-tech industry.

It was during Singh’s years in office that the concept of the Indo-Pacific region was formulated, later becoming the foundation of India’s conceptual approach to the spaces of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

The coming to power of Narendra Modi in 2014 marked the beginning of a new phase. The BJP, having returned to government, faced a whole range of problems and challenges inherited from previous administrations, the most important of which were growing regional disparities and a general slowdown in economic growth. To address these issues, the Indian government launched domestic reforms while simultaneously seeking to extract maximum benefit from the international environment.

The result was a policy that India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar termed "multi-alignment," under which India participates in every possible format that may prove beneficial in the future while imposing no binding obligations upon it. This explains the rather eclectic range of organizations and initiatives in which New Delhi participates and the fact that in some of them—such as the Quad and BDN—India works with other states to "contain" China, while in others, such as the SCO and BRICS, it cooperates with Beijing.

"Multi-alignment," however, is only one among several Indian foreign policy concepts and initiatives, alongside the Indo-Pacific framework, the SAGAR and Mausam projects, and others. Most of them are local or regional in nature; one of the few exceptions is the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam ("The World Is One Family").

The phrase itself originates in ancient Hindu texts and reflects a characteristic Indian perception of the world as a single family in which not only human beings, but all living (and sometimes non-living) and even divine entities coexist in harmony. The concept is so popular in India that the words Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam have even been engraved at the entrance to Parliament. For a long time, however, they remained little more than another beautiful phrase suitable for inclusion in speeches at international forums or at the United Nations: elegant, vague, and non-binding. Recently, however, this ancient concept has been mobilized once again in the service of a greater India.

The impetus came from the adoption of the concept of the "Community of Shared Future for Mankind" at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012. Indians, who closely monitor initiatives emerging from their trans-Himalayan neighbor, initially did not take the new Chinese idea very seriously. But when it became clear that the concept of a "Shared Future for Mankind" was not merely a passing slogan and that Beijing intended to use it as a justification for its strategic initiatives, New Delhi concluded that India needed its own vision of a polycentric future—ancient in form, modern in substance. "The World Is One Family" proved perfectly suited for this purpose.

Nevertheless, the concept immediately came under criticism both within and outside India. Skeptics ask what exactly is meant by "one family" and how such a family would be organized: would it resemble a large South Asian household, where several generations live under one roof and the authority of the elder is unquestioned, or would it take some other form? They also recall tragic family stories familiar to every Indian, such as the Mahabharata, in which relatives slaughter one another on a massive scale.

Political opponents accuse Modi and Jaishankar of attempting to build a foreign policy concept based on values while neglecting India’s vital interests. Some Western analysts have even interpreted the development as an effort by Modi to draw upon the philosophical legacy of the renowned thinker Swami Vivekananda, potentially putting him at odds with his allies on the right, namely the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which takes a more pragmatic nationalist position.

Yet all of these criticisms and suspicions miss the point. As far as one can judge, for India’s leadership Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam is simply one of several grand concepts, similar to the Indo-Pacific region, whose chief virtue lies in its ambiguity. Until Modi and his associates specify precisely what they mean, everyone remains free to interpret "The World Is One Family" in their own way, just as they do China’s "Shared Future." For New Delhi, this flexibility makes it possible to include virtually anything within Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: from claims to global intellectual leadership in world politics to environmental protection and green energy programs.

In this context, BRICS, by virtue of its flexibility and the broad range of issues addressed within its framework, could well serve as a platform for dialogue about the values of the future world. Numerous BRICS events are already devoted to dialogue among the great civilizations; it would be logical to organize, in a Track 1.5 format, a discussion of how these civilizations envision pathways of global development. Indeed, there is simply no other platform where such a comparison of perspectives could take place.

Today, BRICS is undergoing a process of "bottom-up institutionalization": a growing set of formats is gradually emerging from initiatives that were once launched within the framework of specific projects and proved highly successful and useful. These formats contribute no less to the resilience of BRICS than the annual meetings of leaders, and an expert-political dialogue on the future of global development would be a valuable addition to this list.