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260 CHAPTER 14 India and the Indo-Pacific in New Delhi’s BRICS Calculus1 Priya Chacko T he Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) grouping has attracted much derision from commentators who argue that the five countries do not share a common purpose or identity.2 Indeed, even India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, when recently asked about a possible merger between the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) trilateral forum and the BRICS grouping, responded that, ‘IBSA has a personality of its own. It is three separate continents, three democracies. BRIC is a conception devised by Goldman Sachs. We are trying to put life into it’.3 This chapter examines the potential to put life into the BRICS, within the context of India’s foreign policy and the emergence of the Indo-Pacific region. The chapter begins by analysing the rise of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region as a geopolitical and geo-economic space. The emergence of the Indo-Pacific is both a threat and an opportunity for India. It is a threat because the Indo-Pacific is increasingly becoming the site of global geo-economic and geopolitical competition. India risks being co-opted into American attempts to shape the region in ways that perpetuate its dominance over China, and becoming embroiled in geoe-conomic competition and conflict over land and resources. However, as the second part of this chapter argues, the selective multi-lateralism of the BRICS could be a means of maintaining India’s independence and autonomy from the United States (US) while also engaging with China, thereby ensuring the region’s political stability and creating an environment conducive to India’s economic growth and development . Despite their significant differences, the BRICS at this juncture have some common foreign policy goals, which in recent times have led to the adoption of similar positions on dealing with key international events such as Iran’s nuclear programme and the conflicts in Libya and Syria. Moreover, Indian policymakers have also identified several areas of potential BRICS cooperation including collaboration in the food and energy sectors, two areas that have become important foreign policy issues for India due to 261 INDIA AND THE INDO-PACIFIC IN NEW DELHI’S BRICS CALCULUS their central role in India’s development, and are also key potential areas of geo-economic conflict in the Indo-Pacific. The prospects and problems associated with such collaboration will be explored in the final section of the chapter. THE REGIONALISATION OF THE INDO-PACIFIC The rise of India and China has contributed to the emergence of an ‘IndoPacific ’ region that straddles the area between the Indian Ocean from the eastern coast of Africa to the Western Pacific Ocean. During the last 20 years, intra-Asian trade has rapidly eclipsed East Asia’s trade with North America across the Pacific. Intra-Asian trade in 2010 amounted to $2 264 billion, trailing only the European Union at $3 998 billion and dwarfing North America’s trade with Asia at $413 billion. At the same time, Africa’s trade with Asia has also rapidly increased and at $123 billion is only smaller than its trade with Europe at $184 billion.4 With Africa’s trade with Asia growing faster than with any other region and China and India’s enormous need for resources, Africa’s integration into the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is set to deepen. This market-driven process of proliferating transnational trade, investment and production linkages has produced a form of regionalisation that Prasenjit Duara describes as a ‘relatively unplanned or evolutionary emergence of an area of interaction and interdependence’.5 However, this unplanned process is now starting to have a political impact, as a ‘more active, often ideologically driven political process of creating a region’, has emerged in the Indo-Pacific and is being led by the US in an effort to maintain its claims to global leadership.6 According to a recent US Government Strategic Plan for instance, ‘U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities’.7 India has been given a key role in this American-driven regionalisation of the Indo-Pacific, as the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear in a recent speech in India: …today, the stretch of sea from the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific contains the world’s most vibrant trade and energy routs...

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