Beijing organised a special session in a BRICS Plus format, whereby the foreign ministers of Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, and Thailand participated in a virtual session.
The event occurred a day before US President Joe Biden's Asia trip. Biden is expected to unveil his Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and attend the Quad summit in Tokyo.
BRICS, an acronym denoting the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, issued a 25-pronged joint statement following the conclusion of the foreign ministers' meeting.
The joint statement specified a consensus on increasing the role of emerging economies in inclusive global governance, support for Russia-Ukraine negotiations, as well as possible BRICS expansion.
Sputnik spoke with Swaran Singh, a professor at India's Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament at the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, about the initiative at the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting and its implications for India's diplomatic ties with the West.
Sputnik: China chaired a BRICS Plus meet on the sidelines of the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting on Thursday. How do you see the development, given that China has proposed an expansion of the BRICS group?
Swaran Singh: BRICS is a group of "emerging economies" where China's economy has, over the years, expanded rapidly to become five times that of India, 10 times that of Brazil and Russia, and 55 times that of South Africa.
So China's proposition to expand BRICS and invite Argentina as a special guest to the next BRICS summit on June 24 is bound to raise some scepticism, especially when they have not accepted any new members for the last 10 years.
As of now, China has not proposed any names, so their discussions as of now are likely to stay limited to debating a raison d'etre for expansion and/or criterion for taking new members.
Sputnik: What do you think about the list of invitees for the BRICS Plus meeting?
Swaran Singh: In Jim O'Neil's original conception of BRIC as a destination for industrialised nations' fruitful investments, it was also expected to become a major stakeholder in global governance, especially in global financial governance.
The reality of BRICS, of course, has varied from that original imagination and drifted into a range of other issues, from climate change to women empowerment, geopolitics and terrorism, and so on.
And, China's sabre rattling with the United States has increasingly pushed BRICS into the crossfire of US-China relations, with implications for post-pandemic global economic resilience.
Sputnik: The US has proposed its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, with the formal announcement scheduled in Japan next week. These two developments revolve around the eastern parts of the world. How do you see this? Are these products of China's rivalry with the US?
Swaran Singh: President Biden's plan to announce a "launch of negotiations" for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) has been triggered by his Asian allies' criticism of US engagement with the Indo-Pacific being too focused on security and lacking an economic component, especially so after President Donald Trump abruptly walked out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
But reports of his original proposal being "watered down" barely days before its formal announcement shows the disconnect between the US and its Asian partners.
India, which walked out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RECEP) at the very last hour, remains one country reluctant about the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework as well, but this is not the only subject of variance of policy postures between New Delhi and Washington.
Sputnik: India is a crucial member of BRICS as well as Western-led groupings. Will these developments (IPEC, BRICS Plus) further complicate India's position in geopolitics?
Swaran Singh: Surely, India has sought to balance its interactions with both the Quad Security Framework and the BRICS grouping of emerging nations. But the post-pandemic economic rise of China and, more recently, the unending Ukraine crisis have surely complicated India's policy choices, with both Russia and China on the one hand and the United States and its allies wanting to see India tilting to their sides of this sharpening divide.
This has its costs of increased footwork and annoyance and a constant need to fine-tune this balance. A good example is Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelling to Tokyo for the Quad summit on 24 May, but the BRICS summit on 24 June is now being planned online.
Sputnik: Is BRICS Plus an attempt to find an alternative economic bloc that can remain immune from unilateral sanctions imposed by the West?
Swaran Singh: First of all, the idea of aligning "friends of BRICS" had been formally present from 2017, when China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi proposed his "BRICS Plus" paradigm to add dynamism to their summit.
Indeed, way back in 2015, Russia added a component of the BRICS Outreach summit with regional leaders, depending on which of the five was hosting the BRICS summit.
This idea of making BRICS more widespread has added drivers as well, including inordinately large China wanting to add more friends to redress its complications with BRICS' second largest economy, India, with which China has had border tensions and other contentions with, apart from its suspicions about India's growing proximity to Washington.
But India has ensured its strategic autonomy and has been a constant opponent of slapping sanctions from outside the United Nations, where Beijing and New Delhi have no differences. But China being such an oversized economy for the rest of the BRICS, will have to tread carefully in taking the lead in reformulating BRICS' future trajectories.