BRICS showed it's little more than a meaningless acronym

Its expansion can't hide how hollow this grouping has turned out

- PANKAJ MISHRA

The 15th summit of BRICS countries, which was held in South Africa, received unprecedented international attention. Some commentators even invoked the Bandung conference of 1955, where leaders of India, China, Indonesia, Egypt and Yugoslavia launched the non-aligned movement (NAM). It seemed as though another generation of leaders, this time from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, were building an alternative to the US-dominated global order.

As it happened, their doings and sayings ranged from the semi-farcical to the meaningless. According to a leading South African news website, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi refused to leave his aircraft on arrival in South Africa because the host, President Cyril Ramaphosa, wasn’t at the airport to welcome him. China’s Xi Jinping inexplicably failed to deliver a scheduled speech at an opening event where the other leaders spoke, including Russian President Vladimir Putin on video link.

Putin, who didn’t travel due to fear of arrest for war crimes, unsurprisingly blamed the West for his war in Ukraine. Xi’s speech decried a country, unnamed but recognizable, that is “obsessed with maintaining its hegemony" and obstructing China’s rise. Much agitated talk, notably from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, of de-dollarization and an alternative BRICS currency came to nothing.