Volatile Trump may misinterpret BRICS Summit as anti-West, warns ex-diplomat

As BRICS nations prepare to convene in New Delhi for the 18th Summit on Saturday, former diplomat Ajay Bisaria said there is a danger of the US interpreting the summit as anti-Western this time, while stressing that India remains firmly opposed to any attempt to turn it into an explicitly anti-Western platform.Speaking at the India Today BRICS Roundtable, the former High Commissioner of India to Canada said New Delhi had worked to recast BRICS as a "non-Western" grouping rather than an "anti-Western" one.When asked about US President Donald Trump's opposition to BRICS and his labelling of the grouping as anti-American, Bisaria said,"There is a small danger of the US misinterpreting it that way because of a very volatile White House and a very volatile Trump," and the engagement of China and Russia in the platform.He added, "But I would say India, on this, is not going to be batting on the back foot.

India is going to be on the front foot on strategic autonomy and defending the BRICS, uh, but there's always this small danger of it being misinterpreted." However, Bisaria noted that there is not a huge risk of a strong anti-Western message coming out of this BRICS summit.Bisaria said there had been attempts in the past to push BRICS towards an anti-Western position, but that did not suit India." There were some instincts within BRICS in the past which tried to push it towards an anti-Western kind of positioning.

That doesn't suit India, and India doesn't push it in that direction," he said.He added that India had instead sought to change the "branding" of BRICS and present it as a grouping of non-Western countries focused on economic and developmental issues. "What India has been doing successfully is changing the branding to a non-Western grouping rather than an anti-Western grouping," he said.Bisaria also said India's task at the summit would be more complicated than when it hosted the G20, given the presence of two active conflicts and the expanded membership of BRICS.

Even so, he said he was optimistic that India would be able to secure consensus on a summit document, while cautioning that one contentious paragraph on Iran or Ukraine should not become the test of the entire meeting.Geopolitical analyst Ashok Malik, who also joined the discussion with Bisaria at the India Today BRICS Roundtable, said the original BRICS had long carried a tension between two competing visions -- one that saw it mainly as an economic and developmental forum, and another that sought to give it a stronger geopolitical identity.According to Malik, India has consistently backed the former approach, while Russia and China have at times sought to push BRICS in a more explicitly geopolitical direction."

China and Russia have tried to nudge the group in the other direction, not very successfully. It's been a diplomatic tussle. I would argue that with an expanded BRICS, the idea of one common political position or geopolitical position, whether anti-West or pro-X or anti-Y, is that much more difficult because why just look at the West and the anti-West dynamic," Malik, partner of US strategic advisory forum The Asia Group, observed.Malik said expansion would make a single geopolitical position even harder to achieve because the members themselves have sharply divergent interests.

He said the inclusion of countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran made consensus on geopolitical questions particularly difficult.The implication for India, he said, is that BRICS will have to focus on areas where members can find common ground, including economic cooperation, supply chains, development, climate change and resilience, rather than trying to establish a common position against the West.The experts' remarks come amid growing US scrutiny of BRICS as the grouping expands beyond its original members and increasingly discusses issues such as de-dollarisation and reforms to the international financial system.

India, however, has repeatedly maintained that BRICS is not an anti-Western alliance and that its participation is consistent with New Delhi's policy of strategic autonomy.Last year, Trump criticised BRICS for pursuing what he described as "anti-American politics" and threatened to impose a 10 per cent tariff on countries that aligned with the grouping. However, he did not clarify or elaborate on what he meant by "anti-American policies" in his post.- EndsPublished By: Ajmal Published On: Sep 10, 2026 11:27 IST