Head-on | Why India refuses to choose between BRICS and Quad

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a difficult assignment in India: rebooting the four-nation Quad. Following his underwhelming summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, US President Donald Trump has rediscovered the utility value of the Quad and India’s key role in the Indo-Pacific, which China regards as its hunting ground.

Cuban-born Rubio is one of the more moderate members of the volatile Trump cabinet. He enjoys a good working relationship with India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr S. Jaishankar, who chaired the Quad foreign ministers’ meeting on May 26 with Rubio, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Japan’s Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu.

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The meeting ended with several key positives, including the signing of an India-US critical minerals framework and enhanced Quad-wide cooperation on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, port infrastructure and energy.

The Quad heads of government summit is scheduled to be held in India this year. It has been repeatedly postponed and it is uncertain whether it will be held at all in 2026, the year India was to host the summit. Trump has no plans to visit India this year, effectively ruling out a heads of government Quad summit unless the US president has a change of heart. Instead, Trump will host Xi in the White House in September, meet him at the 2026 APEC summit in Shenzhen in November, and again host him at the G20 leaders’ summit in Miami in December.

Following his bilateral summit with Xi earlier this month, Trump would thus have met the Chinese leader four times in 2026: twice in China and twice in the US. In contrast, there are no confirmed meetings between Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi except at the G20 summit in Miami in December. PM Modi is unlikely to take up Trump’s invitation, conveyed by Rubio, to visit the White House “in the near future”.

All this does not imply that the US has surrendered its global primacy to China in a way it never did to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. The pivot to China is a Trump-first policy. The larger US establishment continues to view China as a dangerous and unscrupulous rival. Following the November 2026 Congressional midterm elections, America’s China policy could undergo a shift if the Democratic Party regains control of the House of Representatives.

China is in poorer economic shape than most believe. The latest data from Beijing is especially sobering. Retail sales growth continues to stagnate. It rose 0.2 per cent in April 2026, underscoring China’s domestic consumption crisis. Fixed-asset investment shrank 1.6 per cent in the four months between January and April 2026. Industrial production — the core of China’s manufacturing muscle — grew by just 4.1 per cent in April, down from 5.7 per cent in March and well below median forecasts of 6 per cent.

Xi knows that the miracle years of China’s 9-10 per cent growth are long over. In a defiant show of strength, Xi gave Russian President Vladimir Putin an understated welcome during his two-day visit to China last week. Putin came across as a downgraded junior partner in the China-Russia alliance.

Russia’s military setbacks in Ukraine have diminished its global reputation. It no longer has a major presence in the Middle East following the ouster of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow after the US-Israel operation to install former al-Qaeda associate Ahmed al-Sharaa as president. Putin will be present with Xi and Trump at the APEC meet in Shenzhen and the G20 summit in Miami. But Russia’s influence in global affairs continues to shrink.

Brick by brick

Where does BRICS fit into this rapidly shifting world order? The BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, chaired by Jaishankar in New Delhi earlier this month, was a quiet affair, attended by Russia’s veteran Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the foreign ministers of the other founding BRICS members — Brazil and South Africa — but not China.

Beijing was represented by its ambassador in Delhi, Xu Feihong, a subtle downgrading of the BRICS formulation, which now has six new members, including Iran and the UAE, who are on opposite sides of the West Asia conflict. BRICS thus risks becoming too unwieldy to be effective as a voice of the Global South.

The 2026 BRICS heads of government summit is scheduled to be hosted by India, this year’s rotating chair, in New Delhi on September 12-13. Russia has officially confirmed that Putin will attend. China has unofficially said Xi too will attend. If he does, it will be Xi’s first visit to India since October 2019, eight months before the Galwan Valley clash.

Does BRICS, with 11-member nations, some of whom are hostile to one another, serve a useful purpose anymore? It does because it comprises three of the world’s four largest militaries — China, Russia and India. The fourth, America — which outspends the other three collectively — is an interested spectator. Washington fears a re-emergence of the RIC (Russia-India-China) trilateral alliance, which went into hibernation after Galwan.

As China’s economy slows and Russia’s military weakens, perennial tortoise India could emerge as a balancing geopolitical pivot. Recent outreach to the Nordic countries and Italy, as well as to the UAE and Oman, can place India at the intersection of the US-led Western hemisphere and the China-led Asia-Pacific theatre.

India has plenty of economic problems to worry about: high crude oil prices, a falling rupee, a spike in inflation and the flight of foreign portfolio investors. But India’s structural economic strengths remain intact. Both BRICS and the Quad serve India in its unfolding geopolitical rise.

However, as Neelkanth Mishra, chief economist at Axis Bank, warned in an op-ed in a business daily: “India’s rise will be a ‘resisted rise’ — against the ‘assisted rise’, for example, of post-WW2 Japan, Germany, then South Korea and Taiwan, and finally China.”

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)