• by Shyam Saran
• Thursday, April 12, 2012
• Inter Press Service

The Delhi Declaration and Action Plan adopted at the 4th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on March 29, 2012, would have quickly laid to rest any residual anxiety in Western capitals that a serious rival focus of power and influence was beginning to take shape in the Indian capital, writes Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary with the government of India.

One look at the wholly pedestrian Action Plan and any illusion of substantive intent would be quickly dispelled. Following a Declaration which promises much, the Action Plan reads like a "trivial pursuit". It should have been billed as a tentative calendar of prospective meetings and events rather than be given the status of an Action Plan.

The Declaration bears the clear imprint of China and, to some extent, Russia on some key economic and political issues. The most notable example of this is the thinly veiled but unusually harsh criticism of the U.S.-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is seen as mainly directed against China.

BRICS is here to stay as a familiar feature on the international landscape. It has the economic and political heft to play an influential role provided it is able to act together on key issues. In that sense, the Delhi Summit remained mostly a flag-waving exercise. Unlike the G-7 earlier, the group lacks a common ideological and cultural underpinning. The security perspectives of its members are not aligned. In terms of economic objectives, they have both convergent and divergent interests. In the foreseeable future the most realistic prospect for BRICS may be their working as a coalition on issues of common interest such as reform of the international financial institutions, resisting protectionism and promoting development in developing countries.

*Shyam Saran is a former Foreign Secretary with the government of India. He is currently chairman of the Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries (RIS) think-tank and senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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