BRICS 2025 may all be about just symbolism and rhetoric

India's empathy for Israel, combined with its right-wing orientation, constricts its ability to contain Pak's outreach to Islamic nations

- KC SINGH

The 17th BRICS summit is due at Rio de Janeiro on July 6-7. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend, besides officially visiting four African and Caribbean nations.

British economist Jim O'Neill in 2001 foresaw Brazil, Russia, India and China as promising emerging markets, and christened it BRIC. Their first summit was in 2009, with South Africa joining the next year, making it BRICS. Next expansion, to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE occurred in 2024, with Indonesia joining the following year. However, geopolitics are never static. Joseph Nye correctly sensed "intra-organizational rivalries". The 2020 Galwan military standoff between India and China is one example. Another is the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine six years later, a conflict still raging. South Africa-US relations got strained over the former targeting Israel for massacring civilians in Gaza. President Donald Trump played a wrong tape, with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa beside him in White House, alleging undiplomatically an anti-White crusade.

Finally, the Pahalgam terror attack, which led to the 4-day India-Pakistan armed conflict, escalated distrust between India and China. Consequently, a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) resolution was vetoed by India over non-inclusion of the terror attack. The SCO was originally created to generate counterterrorism cooperation. Furthermore, the BRICS summit is being held following the trade was unleashed by US President Donald Trump, employing irrationally exaggerated tariffs on exports of its trading partners.