India Is Positioning Itself Between Blocs

The United States’ struggle to preserve the unipolar world slipped another step back when India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi met the People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the 2024 BRICS summit.

India and China’s already strained relationship strained even more in 2020 when 20 Indian troops and four Chinese troops were killed in hand-to-hand combat along their disputed border in the Galwan Valley of the Western Himalayas.

The U.S. has long exploited the animosity between the world’s two largest countries, using India as a counterbalance to China, containing the PRC and driving a wedge between it and the Global South.

In America’s geopolitical battle to tain a U.S.-led unipolar world over a multipolar system preferred by Russia and China, India is the giant with one foot in each world. The world’s second-largest nation’s choice of sides will determine whether the unipolar world survives or evolution favors multipolarity.

But what the U.S. struggles to see—to the detriment of its own foreign policy and its own self-interest—is that India, and much of the Global South, no longer sees itself as having to make a choice between blocs. The choice of a multipolar world means not having to choose sides. In his book, The India Way, India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, explains that multipolarity means that countries can deal “with contesting parties at the same time with optimal results” for their “own self-interest.” 

While recently the relationship between India and the U.S. has continued to improve, so has the relationship between India and Russia. India is a member of the U.S. led QUAD, whose purpose is to contain and deflate China, while also being a member of the Russian- and Chinese-led BRICS and SCO, whose purpose is to counterbalance American hegemony in a unipolar world. India has refused to join the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia. Since the war, Russia has climbed from India’s 18th-largest trading partner to its fourth and its largest supplier of oil. 

While the U.S. has fought against that multipolar trend and tried to drive a wedge between India and China, Russia has seen itself as a mediator between its two friends both in BRICS and in the core RIC formation of Russia, India and China that first formed in 1998. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has noted that part of the role of RIC is “in promoting trust and confidence between India and China.”

Mediation and multipolarity took a decisive step forward over divisiveness and unipolarity when Modi met Xi on the sidelines of the BRICS summit. It was their first official high-level bilateral meeting in almost five years. The meeting came just two days after China and India reached an agreement to deescalate the tensions on their disputed Himalayan border. The agreement led to the “resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020.”

Stressing the importance of the meeting both for the two countries and for the world, Modi said, “Met President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Kazan BRICS Summit. India-China relations are important for the people of our countries, and for regional and global peace and stability. Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity will guide bilateral relations.”

Xi agreed, saying that “China and India are both… important members of the global south” and their meeting “best serves the fundamental interests of our two countries and peoples.” Xi then added, “It’s also important for both sides to shoulder our international responsibility, set an example for boosting the strength and unity of developing countries and to contribute to promoting multi-polarization and democracy in international relations.”

In addition to the significance of the seismic shift in Indian-Chinese relations, there is also symbolic significance in India and China recognizing Russia’s mediation by holding their historic meeting in Russia.

The thawing relations between India and China signifies another step in the world’s transformation from U.S. hegemony and unipolarity to the emerging, new multipolarity.