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Politics
As China lays the BRICS
India’s ideological ties with the US and Israel make it a distrusted BRICS partner, while China uses the bloc to expand its technological and economic influence. Modi’s awkward balancing act leaves India vulnerable to Beijing.
Some in BRICS unofficially suspect Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being a Trojan horse. They believe that US President Donald Trump has excessive sway over Modi, which may or may not be linked to Gautam Adani’s legal troubles in New York; enough Indian right-wingers, however, also believe India should be strategically aligned with the US and its puppet-master Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The RSS and BJP admire Israel’s anti-Muslim stand and its Greater Israel project, believing it may one day help bring about Akhand Bharat. Secretly, they may even rejoice over the genocide in Gaza.
Certainly, in India there is suspicion that the new 0.4 per cent merchant discount rate (MDR) on UPI payments above Rs.2000 is further evidence that Modi is remote-controlled by Trump. After all, a merchant who does not want to pass the cost to consumers may simply ask for a credit card; Visa and Mastercard are US companies that extract profit from such financialisation. There is the 100 per cent tariff on Indian imports approved by the US Congress. And while Trump has approved $2.8 billion in arms to Israel, India has also, since 2023, made 2,600 shipments to Israel, including an Adani arms export, the Hermes 900-drone missile. India’s foreign diplomacy may congratulate itself for breaking the ice at BRICS between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, a part of the Israel-US-India alliance, but no one in BRICS will overlook India’s arms exports to Zionism’s cruel regime.
Nonetheless, no one is going to throw India out of BRICS. And as the host of the recent summit, New Delhi had the chance to push its own agenda. Our spoon-fed media highlighted the border dispute in Modi’s bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The consequent pronouncements on the border, which saw clashes in Galwan, Ladakh, in 2020, and encroachments in Arunachal Pradesh this year, make one believe that the government is satisfied with keeping the new status quo intact.
Perhaps New Delhi accepts that we have reached on the border what political scientist Kanti Bajpai characterised as the “Nash equilibrium”, meaning a stable but tense relationship without confrontation, but which is tenuous. (John Nash was a Nobel laureate mathematician and game theorist, played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.) Modi said, "Differences should not become disputes," and that both sides must be guided by “mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest”. Truce, please.
If that’s the case, what did Modi want in substance? “The weaponisation of technology and critical minerals can hinder our shared progress,” he said at the open session of the two-day summit’s second day (tongue-twistingly titled “Resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability: Shaping the future for inclusive global growth”). “Therefore, we have emphasised inclusivity in the adoption of technology.”
While some commentators saw Modi as batting, again, for the US, which is in dire need of rare earths that are critical to their rapidly depleting armaments, it sounded suspiciously like something this column mentioned last week: the petulance of India’s top industrial houses that China was not sharing/selling battery technology, necessary for EVs and large battery storage, and set to be critical in the years ahead.
In June, Reliance’s Anant Ambani complained that the Chinese were “weaponising the technology” for LFP (Lithium-Iron-Phosphate) cells, having failed to negotiate a licensing deal. In August, Parth Jindal of JSW also charged China with “guarding” LFP technology “like a weapon”. China, which developed this technology over 30 years, is not going to simply sell it to Indian businesses. Xi possibly relayed this to Modi during their bilateral, after which he excused himself from the banquet (seeing the unappetising menu, who can blame him?).
What did Xi want? “China will be a pioneer in establishing a BRICS AI open-source community, support cooperation in developing and applying large language models, hold specialised AI seminars and training courses, and build an open ecosystem for AI,” Xi told the same concluding BRICS session.
There has been heated discussion over AI in the US the past week, kicked off by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s paper, “We Must Pace the Frontier”. Basically, he has called for the slowing down of AI development. Researchers at Anthropic and at OpenAI quit their jobs over fears that “superintelligence” could threaten humanity itself.
Critics say that these companies are talking about “pacing” the frontier to bring in government regulation. These American AI companies are not making money. They are afraid the Chinese will develop AI faster and cheaper (due to open-source AI development). The main target of regulation would be Chinese AI.
Trump pooh-poohs this position. He called Jensen Huang (who put him on speakerphone) at a panel discussion to dismiss the dangers of AI. Huang is the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s largest company by market capitalisation (above $5 trillion). Nvidia is making big money from AI-driven chip sales. Huang has told Trump that the US should keep developing AI and selling chips to stay ahead of China. Trump characteristically believes the money-making Nvidia than the AI development companies.
In either case, US AI companies fear China. (India is not a player in this next Great Game.) China has dismissed US concerns as fearmongering, though its spy chief, Chen Yixin, has warned that AI could threaten the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. Hence, he suggested that the party keep tight control of AI.
With Xi’s proposal for an AI ecosystem for BRICS, it might mean only one thing: that China intends to dominate BRICS nations through AI. The 8.33 GW of data centres proposed around India will no doubt be fed into the China-controlled AI ecosystem.
Frankly, then, Modi might well be a Trojan horse, but the Chinese have mastered how to break this horse. China marches ahead; the US fears it alone. China knows how to keep India bogged down, and India has done itself no favours by the friends it keeps, purely for ideological reasons. I, for one, want the doomsayers to come true: an AI-run India would be far better than this hollow regime.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.