Currencies, Trade and Other Tensions: India’s Balancing Act

India, the “I” in the middle of BRICS, might also be said to occupy its middle ground. Having expanded beyond the five nations in the acronym – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the bloc is seen as an economic counterweight to the West, a potential challenger to the U.S. dollar’s global dominance.

At the same time, India has surpassed China in population, sought to assert its own leadership among emerging-market economies, while trading actively with the U.S. and belonging to the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. security grouping known as The Quad.

India has staked out a position so that China “didn’t portray itself as the only voice of the Global South,” Tanvi Madan, Brookings Institution senior fellow – foreign policy, Center for Asia Policy Studies, explained in a Peterson Institute for International Economics webinar.

Far from being BRICS-exclusive, India maintains a “diversified portfolio of partners,” characterized in recent years by informal coalitions, or “issue-based groupings” called pluralaterals or minilaterals, Madan said.

Brookings’ Tanvi Madan

It is a “balancing act,” as Peterson Institute nonresident...