Not anti-West, but alt-West

India holds the BRICS presidency in 2026. It should use this moment to make one thing clear, both to Indians and to India’s friends in the West: BRICS is not an anti-Western alliance, and India does not need to apologise for it. Every time BRICS gathers momentum, the same anxiety surfaces in India’s strategic conversation. Are we getting too close to China? Will the US think India is joining an anti-Western bloc? Is BRICS becoming a vehicle for China and Russia? Are we jeopardising our relationship with the US? These are legitimate questions, but they begin with the wrong premise. They assume that “non-Western” is the same as “anti-Western”. It is not.The Western media has been relentless in its framing: BRICS is painted as an anti-Western alliance, a Global South insurgency against the liberal international order, an emerging counter-NATO to rival American hegemony. This framing is not merely inaccurate. It is lazy and it does India and the broader project a profound disservice. The sooner India articulates what BRICS actually is, the sooner we can have an honest conversation with both Western interlocutors and Global South partners about what we are building.Let me be precise about the distinction that matters most. BRICS is not anti-Western. It is non-Western. This difference is enormous and cannot be glossed over. When I describe something as non-Western, I mean it exists outside the sphere of Western institutional dominance and operates according to principles that are not derived from Western strategic or financial interests. When something is anti-Western, it is defined by opposition to the West itself, by hostility to Western civilisation or values, by a deliberate project to diminish or defeat Western interests. BRICS is the former, not the latter.Also Read | Why India must reset BRICSIndeed, BRICS has no integrated military command, no collective defence clause comparable to NATO’s Article 5, no unified strategic doctrine against any particular adversary, and frankly, not enough internal agreement among its members to ever become such an instrument. India and China have serious geopolitical differences. Russia and China have converging interests but are hardly interchangeable. Brazil has its own distinct traditions of strategic autonomy. South Africa maintains its own set of priorities. The very diversity of BRICS, which many in India view as a weakness, is actually its structural protection against domination by any single power.A fundamental misunderstandingThe confusion about BRICS stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what it actually represents. BRICS is not the Global South’s answer to NATO. That framing misses the point entirely. NATO is a military-political alliance built on the premise of collective defence against a perceived adversary. BRICS possesses no such architecture and no such purpose. Rather, BRICS should be understood as the Global South’s answer to the Bretton Woods financial architecture, which has dominated global economic governance since 1944.When we speak of Bretton Woods, we are not speaking of a conspiracy or an ideological imposition. We are speaking of a specific institutional and financial framework created in the aftermath of the Second World War that has governed global trade, capital flows, and economic decision-making for eight decades.That architecture was born of particular post-war conditions: a world recovering from devastation, American industrial dominance, and the practical need for an ordering principle for international commerce. The dollar became the peg, not because it was inherently superior but because America possessed the gold reserves, the industrial capacity, and the military security that made dollar-backed trade conceivable. The IMF and the World Bank became the mechanisms through which this architecture was operationalised. These were not neutral instruments. They were instruments of a particular post-war order dominated by Western powers.Now, in 2026, that order is fraying, not because it is Western but because it has become genuinely constraining for the majority of the world’s population. The Global South did not choose this architecture. It was inherited, often imposed. For much of the past 80 years, it has meant that critical economic decisions affecting hundreds of millions of people were made in rooms where those people had no genuine voice.India has benefited from the international economic order, and there is nothing inherently sinister about the Bretton Woods system. The dollar remains indispensable, Western capital remains important, and the IMF and the World Bank continue to perform functions that no serious policymaker should casually dismiss.

A representative image showing how the BRICS countries pose a challenge to US hegemony in the world economic order. | Photo Credit: iStock/Getty Images But institutions created in 1944 cannot be treated as though the distribution of global economic power was frozen in 1944. The economic geography of the world has changed dramatically. Asian economies have grown to represent a substantial portion of the global GDP. African nations are rising. Emerging markets now represent nearly half of global economic output. Yet the institutional architecture that governs international finance reflects none of this reality.BRICS is simply asking a question that should not be controversial: why should Washington, New York, London, and institutions historically dominated by Western powers remain the principal gatekeepers of international finance when the economic world has fundamentally transformed?This is where BRICS has a legitimate and constructive purpose. Countries of the Global South are not demanding that Washington disappear from the international system. They are asking for competition, alternatives, and representation commensurate with their economic weight. The answer does not have to be revolution. It can simply be the creation of parallel institutions.The New Development Bank represents something India should instinctively support: another source of development finance, another market for capital, another mechanism for financing infrastructure in emerging economies, and another institution in which countries like India possess meaningful agency.Similarly, the debate over “de-dollarisation” has become unnecessarily hysterical in Western discourse. India does not need to campaign against the dollar, nor should it. There is no agreed BRICS currency waiting to replace the dollar. What BRICS countries are actually exploring is far more practical: greater settlement in national currencies, cheaper cross-border transactions, interoperable payment mechanisms, and greater local-currency financing.This is not an assault on America. It is financial risk management. If an Indian company trades with Brazil, why must every transaction necessarily make a compulsory pilgrimage through a third country’s currency? If infrastructure can be financed in rupees rather than dollars, reducing exchange-rate exposure for Indian borrowers, why should India object? This is simply the language of efficiency and sovereignty, not of ideology.Over the longer term, there is nothing heretical about exploring neutral reserve or settlement mechanisms, including commodity or gold-linked instruments, provided they are economically sound. Bretton Woods itself once placed gold at the foundation of the dollar-based monetary order. Exploring whether a future settlement architecture might incorporate gold or another neutral store of value is hardly revolutionary. In one sense, it would represent a return to an older monetary instinct: the recognition that trust need not reside entirely in another government’s fiat currency. Gold has no nationality. It cannot be weaponised through monetary policy by any single state. Its value is determined by universal scarcity and universal acceptance, not by the policy decisions of any central bank.If you are building an alternative financial architecture, you need an anchor that no single power can manipulate. This is the language of engineering and pragmatism, not ideology. But India should not confuse this possibility with present BRICS policy. There is no BRICS gold-backed currency today, and India does not need one to make the larger case for financial pluralism and institutional choice.The deeper Indian anxiety, of course, concerns Chinese power within BRICS. Here, too, India should have greater confidence in itself and in the institutional design of BRICS itself. China will obviously exercise enormous influence within BRICS because it is enormous. But influence is not the same as control. India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and the expanded membership possess interests sufficiently different from China’s and from one another’s for BRICS to be unlikely to become anybody’s obedient instrument. India’s answer to Chinese power cannot be to vacate every institution in which China is powerful. By that logic, India should retreat from half of Asia. The better strategy is to occupy the room, shape the rules, build coalitions, prevent any single member from dominating the others, and insist upon consensus.Designed to prevent hegemonic powerThe structure of BRICS is being designed precisely to prevent hegemonic power by any one state. India possesses enough economic weight, democratic legitimacy, technological capability, and strategic autonomy within BRICS to prevent its capture by any external power. Indeed, India’s presence within BRICS serves as a counterbalance to Chinese influence precisely because India refuses to align automatically with China. The diversity of interests within BRICS is not a bug that must be fixed. It is a feature that must be preserved and leveraged.Now here is what India must do: explain this confidently to its Western partners. India does not have to choose between BRICS and the US, between the Quad and the Global South, or between Western capital and alternative financial institutions. This obsession with forcing India into binary geopolitical categories misunderstands India’s own diplomatic history and the sophistication of Indian strategic thought.Jawaharlal Nehru understood this decades ago. Whatever one thinks of his individual foreign-policy decisions, the intellectual audacity behind non-alignment was unmistakable. India refused the proposition that a newly independent country had to become either Western or Soviet. Non-alignment was not isolation. It was an assertion of agency. India would cooperate with both camps while belonging strategically to neither.

Jawaharlal Nehru with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Marshal Tito, founders of the non-aligned movement. Nehru’s India once had the confidence to tell a bipolar world that it did not have to choose between East and West. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES Modern India, vastly richer, stronger, and more consequential than the India Nehru led, should be capable of articulating an equally sophisticated doctrine for BRICS. Indeed, we must. BRICS is not anti-Western. Perhaps the better description is alt-Western: an alternative architecture existing alongside the Western-built one, sometimes cooperating with it, sometimes competing with it and occasionally correcting it. BRICS itself has demanded reform of the IMF and the World Bank, not their destruction. Its declarations have called for Bretton Woods institutions that are more representative and reflective of the growing economic weight of emerging and developing countries. That hardly sounds like an organisation preparing to burn Bretton Woods to the ground. It sounds like countries asking for another table at which to sit.The goal for India should not be to replace one financial hegemon with another, the dollar with the renminbi, or the US with China. That would merely reproduce the same problem under a different flag. The goal should be transactional freedom: more currencies, more institutions, more financing options, more payment channels, and therefore more sovereignty for countries that currently have too few choices. A multipolar world requires a more multipolar economic architecture. That is precisely why India’s BRICS presidency in 2026 matters.Also Read | Will Modi’s trip to Tianjin prove to be a turning point in India-China relations?Its chosen theme, “Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”,  gives New Delhi an opportunity to articulate what BRICS should mean in the emerging world order. Not an anti-Western coalition. Not China’s instrument. Not a crusade against the dollar. And certainly not a forced choice between Washington and Beijing. India should instead articulate BRICS as an alternative architecture for economic governance, one that expands choices without demanding allegiances, that increases options without requiring subordination to any single power.Nehru’s India once had the confidence to tell a bipolar world that it did not have to choose between East and West. Modern India should surely have equal confidence in making this simple argument to its Western friends: BRICS is not against you. It is about ensuring that you are no longer the only option. That is not anti-Westernism. That is not antagonism toward Western civilisation or Western partnership. That is the assertion of strategic autonomy for a multipolar age. India should articulate this clearly, proudly and without apology. We are not choosing between the West and Asia, between democracy and development, between partnership and sovereignty. We are claiming our place in a plural world where financial and institutional architecture serves all, not subordinates many to the interests of a few. That is the future. And it is not anti-Western. It is simply, necessarily, inevitably, post-Western.Ambassador Manav Sachdeva is a senior international governance and policy professional and independent strategic counsel with 25 years of experience across the UN system, World Bank, OSCE, and USAID.