In an era of fraying multilateralism, the BRICS Summit in Brazil offered a rare window into the key international issues on which the Global South is largely united, including some that are of major concern to India. At the same time, the meeting showed just how challenging it will be for the grouping to stay united amid criticism from Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America. With the bloc expanding to 10 members — Indonesia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joining Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — many analysts had voiced fears that BRICS could become unwieldy and unable to coalesce around any united position. That might still happen, but the early signs are positive. Members were united in condemning the attacks on Iran by the US and Israel as well as Israel’s brutal, ongoing war on Gaza in which more than 55,000 people — most of them women and children — have been killed and hunger deployed as a weapon. Crucially for India, BRICS’s members were unambiguous in their criticism of the Pahalgam attack and in making clear that BRICS stood opposed to cross-border terrorism. That is a position that New Delhi could not convince the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, another body with many of the same members — but also Pakistan — to take recently.

But the conclave in Rio de Janeiro also set the stage for renewed tensions between BRICS and Mr Trump’s administration. The summit declaration criticised the use of unilateral sanctions, which the US and its allies have deployed against Russia and Iran, in particular, and which New Delhi, too, has been consistently opposed to. BRICS also hit out at the use of tariffs as a tool of international trade — a barb that was aimed at
Mr Trump. The US president struck back, threatening an additional 10% tariff on all countries aligned with BRICS, which he described as an anti-American grouping even though its members have been at pains to contest that description. Given these developments, BRICS finds itself at a crossroads. Mr Trump knows that tariffs could seriously hurt many of the bloc’s export-driven economies and appears to be using that to try to divide — or even break up — the grouping. Yet buckling to a bully only invites more coercion. How BRICS and its leading members, including India, respond to this challenge will shape not only the bloc’s future but also their own equations with the US.