India and the Myth of the BRICS Counterweight
After the Cold War limped off the stage and the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own lies, the world awoke to a strange and lopsided silence. For decades, global order had been brutally simple. There were two poles, two gods, two narratives, and everyone else pretended to be neutral while quietly choosing sides. The so-called Non-Aligned Movement was less a third bloc than a masquerade ball. If you bothered to peek behind the curtain, allegiance was obvious. The world was bipolar, and everyone knew exactly who the villains were supposed to be.
That clarity vanished overnight.
The United States inherited not just victory, but solitude. Say what you want about adversaries—and people usually do—but a worthy adversary is not the worst thing a civilization can have. Properly handled, opposition sharpens institutions, disciplines elites, and prevents decadence from metastasizing unchecked. Rome without Carthage decayed. Britain without continental rivals grew lazy. America without a peer did not become wise; it became complacent.
Globalization followed as a quasi-religious project, evangelized by Washington and eagerly adopted by everyone else. It worked—until it didn’t. The assumption was that economic integration would dissolve old fault lines, that prosperity would pacify resentment, and that rules written by the winners would be obeyed forever. That assumption was naïve. Once globalization began to fray, the world did what it always does: it reverted to type.
As the United States hovered above the system—aloof, dominant, structurally untouchable—those just below began searching for ways to blunt its edge. Not to replace it, mind you. Merely to wound it, constrain it, remind it that gravity still applies.
One of the more theatrical attempts at this was BRICS.
Originally a tidy acronym—Brazil, Russia, India, China—later padded with South Africa for reasons that had more to do with optics than economics, BRICS was marketed as a counterweight to American dominance. A multipolar future, they said. A new financial order. Alternative institutions. Parallel systems. Anything the West did, BRICS would do louder, prouder, and with fewer lectures about human rights.
In theory.
By 2026, the verdict is in. BRICS was never a bloc. It was a mood. A resentment-based support group masquerading as a geopolitical force. Plenty of press releases, very little cohesion, and almost no shared strategic horizon. It did not replace American power. It merely advertised dissatisfaction with it.
And yet—amid the rubble—one member still warrants attention.
Why India Is Still Interesting
Among the BRICS nations, India stands alone. Not as a savior. Not as a miracle. But as the last plausible candidate still breathing.
Russia is a geopolitical hospice patient, propped up by nostalgia and hydrocarbons, its future measured in election cycles rather than generations. China’s economic engine—once admired for its ruthless efficiency—is now trapped by the very mechanisms that powered its rise: collapsing demographics, grotesque capital misallocation, and control systems so tight they risk killing the patient during treatment. Brazil remains mired in corruption and structural paralysis so deep that “reform” has become an academic abstraction. South Africa, meanwhile, has pioneered a postmodern form of economic self-harm, blending ideological zeal with institutional decay in ratios not seen since the mid-20th century.
India, by comparison, looks almost luminous.
But this is a low bar. Being the healthiest patient in a terminal ward does not make one immortal.
Yes, India has advantages. Demographics that still lean favorable. Geography that practically begs for relevance. Scale that cannot be ignored. It is the natural hegemon of the Indian Ocean basin by simple cartography alone, and one of the few large Asian countries still enjoying positive population growth. That youthfulness invites lazy comparisons to China circa 1995—before the demographic bill came due.
But demographics and geography are inputs, not guarantees. History is littered with almost-powers: states that had everything except discipline, institutional adaptability, or internal coherence. They climbed most of the mountain and then camped there, congratulating themselves while others passed them by.
India would not be the first to stall just below the summit.
Power, Suspicion, and the Reality of Nation-States
To understand India, one must remember that its last unified native rule ended over two millennia ago. The Maurya Empire governed the subcontinent roughly 2,200 years in the past. Everything since has been conquest, fragmentation, or foreign administration. The Mughals—often romanticized—were Central Asian conquerors. Their empire was wealthy, yes, but it was not Indian in origin. In their decline, they played second fiddle to a trading company with cannons.
That leaves scars.
A long history of domination produces a society that is alert, suspicious, and adept at maneuver. Indians are not a trusting people, nor should they be. They learned early that power lies elsewhere and that survival requires gamesmanship. This is not a moral failing. It is historical conditioning.
Let’s dispense with the fairy tales. Nations play games. Always have. Trust is not a virtue in geopolitics; it is a currency. India understands this instinctively. To New Delhi, trust is extended cautiously, withdrawn quickly, and never confused with friendship.
This makes others uneasy—not because India is uniquely duplicitous, but because it is ambitious enough to matter. Every serious nation has designs. The only question is whether it has the patience and power to execute them.
India believes it has leverage beyond that of small states. It is correct. But leverage exists on a gradient. The United States operates on an entirely different scale and does not bother pretending otherwise. Washington plays the same selfish game—only with longer reach, deeper pockets, and fewer illusions. Nations are not charities. They are predators with flags.
India is less entangled with the global economy than China was. But “less” is not “free.” A forced retrenchment—reliance on domestic demand, regional trade, and internal absorption—would hurt. Badly. Change always hurts.
When pressured, the United States repatriates value with credible force. India does not have that luxury.
The Economic Fork: Innovation or Imitation
India cannot continue as the eternal understudy—cheap factory floor here, outsourced cubicle farm there. That script belongs to a dying era. Globalization is not dead, but it is wounded, and supply chains are retreating behind national borders.
India has already demonstrated that it can innovate when it loosens the leash. Its entrepreneurs are not the problem. Trust is. For the state to step back would require dismantling parts of a bureaucracy that exists largely to justify its own existence. Systems do not surrender control voluntarily.
A friend of mine once ran the local subsidiary of an engineering firm in India. He had worked in deeply bureaucratic countries before. None prepared him for this. The engineers were excellent—sharp, professional, motivated. What broke him was the paperwork. Every step smothered in forms, approvals, signatures, stamps. Progress moved at the speed of institutional fear.
In most of the world, young people dream of building things. In India, many dream of becoming civil servants. Stability trumps ambition. A bureaucrat may not get rich, but the income is predictable, the power is local, and the opportunities for “supplements” are well understood.
This is not accidental. It is a patronage system refined over centuries. And patronage systems do not reform themselves out of moral awakening. They change when pressure becomes unbearable.
Do not hold your breath. Mayhem is not imminent in India. It is slow-cooking.
AI will accelerate this reckoning. It will either empower Indian builders or be smothered under layers of procedural glue. Bureaucracy rarely kills systems quickly. It suffocates them patiently.
Killing the Hype Cycle
India is fascinating. So is the United States. But precision matters.
There is only one country with a fully integrated global footprint, and it is not hiding behind hype cycles or demographic projections. I have watched hype machines combust before—China, the Gulf states, Russia, the Soviet Union before them. Each time, analysts confused momentum with destiny.
India is not a miracle waiting behind a sari. It is a country with serious potential and equally serious constraints.
The United States, dysfunctional as it often appears, retains genuine “do not test me” capability. And in America’s case, dysfunction is not merely decay—it is also renewal. Chaos resets systems. India’s structures, by contrast, resist change. They calcify. Renewal is harder.
That matters.
BRICS as Farce, Not Force
If American leadership remains even intermittently connected to reality, BRICS does not trouble it. Nor should it. BRICS is not an alliance. It is group therapy for economies that resent the existing order but cannot replace it.
India and China are rivals at best, enemies at worst. Russia and China circle each other warily. South Africa barely functions. Brazil sinks deeper into economic quicksand. India is the brightest bulb in a dim chandelier—and even it flickers.
The myth of a unified counterweight persists largely because defense budgets require monsters to justify themselves.
India’s Internal Contradiction
India is a theater of contradictions: modern aesthetics draped over medieval structures. Its elites are polished, urbane, and ruthlessly competent. Beneath them lies a vast population whose function is largely to sustain the hierarchy above.
This structure is also India’s cage.
Innovation cannot rise where mobility is constrained. The caste machine hums quietly, terrified of the masses it depends on. India plays geopolitics brilliantly—but brilliance does not dissolve internal gravity.
The Ottoman Empire peaked before decline. India risks stagnating before its peak ever arrives.
Globalization no longer offers an external pressure valve. Bureaucracy will expand. Talent will leave. Great-power status will remain aspirational.
Geography Is Not Destiny
India is a natural regional power. Beyond that, the mystique fades. It brings complications, not clarity.
The United States arrogance is tolerated because it is backed by unmatched capability. India has yet to earn that indulgence.
The question is not whether India has promise.
It does.
The question is whether it has the discipline, adaptability, and internal courage to convert promise into permanence—before history loses patience.
And history, unlike hype, always collects its debts.
