13th BRICS Summit for an “inclusive intra-Afghan dialogue” for stability in Afghanistan.

CategoryPolity

Last Updated10/09/2021

The 13th BRICS Summit is going to be held under India’s Chairship in 2021. It will be the third time that India will be hosting the BRICS Summit after 2012 and 2016.
The Indian Chairship of BRICS this year coincides with the fifteenth anniversary of BRICS, as reflected in the theme for the Summit.
The theme for the Summit: ‘BRICS@15: Intra-BRICS cooperation for continuity, consolidation and consensus.’

The BRICS summit is taking place at a time two of the Bloc’s members, India and China, are locked in a bitter border standoff in eastern Ladakh for over six months.
The BRICS is known as an influential Bloc that represents over 3.6 billion people, or half of the world’s population.
Such summits are significant for India as the BRICS countries have a combined GDP of USD 16.6 trillion.

BRICS is the group composed of the five major emerging countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
It together represents about 42% of the population, 23% of GDP, 30% of the territory and 18% of the global trade.
The acronym BRIC was coined by economist ‘Jim O’Neill’ of Goldman Sachs in 2001 to indicate the emerging powers that would be, alongside the United States, the five largest economies of the world in the 21st century.
In 2006, BRIC countries started their dialogue, which since 2009 takes place at annual meetings of heads of state and government.
In 2011, with South Africa joining the group, the BRICS reached its final composition, incorporating a country from the African continent.

India had outlined four priority areas for its Chairship. These are Reform of the:

Concerns about aggressions from Russia in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and China in the South China Sea, the border with India and internally in Hongkong and Xinjiang are clear visible.
There is creeping authoritarianism in democracies like Brazil and India have made investors question long-term prospects of the group.
In the market, BRICS has been mocked for being “broken”, while others have suggested it should be expanded to include more emerging economies like Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, called the “Next-11”.

BRICS is an idea that has endured two decades, an idea its members remain committed to, and not one has skipped the annual summits held since 2009.
Along the way, BRICS has created the New Development Bank (NDB) set up with an initial capital of $100 billion.
There is a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement fund to deal with global liquidity crunches, and a BRICS payment system proposing to be an alternative to the SWIFT payment system.

The BRICS ministerial meeting held this week sent several important signals to that end, issuing two outcome documents.
It included the first “standalone” joint statement on reforming multilateral institutions, including the UN and the UNSC, IMF and World Bank and the WTO.
It remains to be seen how far countries like China and Russia, which are already “inside the tent” at the UNSC, will go in advocating for the other BRICS members.
Another important agreement was the BRICS ministerial decision to support negotiations at the WTO for the waiver of trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) for vaccines and medicines to tackle the Coronavirus.

BRICS, being one of the pillars of the emerging fairer polycentric world order, plays an important stabilising role in global affairs.
In the storming ocean of world politics, BRICS can contribute significantly in maintaining international stability and ensuring global economic growth and becoming a united center of the multipolar world.