PANAJI: Underlining the need for expansion of BRICS and opening up the doors for new members to the influential grouping, Vice-Chancellor of Goa University Prof Varun Sahni said that inter-civilisational format of the forum is incomplete without the participation of Islamic countries.
Saying that there is a need to involve at least one Islamic country in the grouping, Prof Sahni said that Indonesia being the largest democratic Islamic country should be allowed into the grouping mainly to counter China as like India, Indonesia is also wary about it.
Sahni was speaking at the lecture-cum-interactive session on ‘BRICS: Yesterday’s story or a sign of the coming times’ organised by Goa Study Group on Thursday. The lecture was chaired by Eduardo Faleiro, chairman of World Council for Peace – India and former Union minister of state for external affairs.
Calling for immediate transformation of governance structure, Sahni said BRICS in order to become genuinely revisionist force in global governance and world politics, will have to transform from preserved conglomeration of five large countries by adding new members to the grouping as it can then play a bigger role.
However, he said that the expansion is not possible before this Summit as the preparatory work should have been started 7-8 months ago.
“The faster the pace of the decline of US power, the better it will be for China, Russia and Brazil. I don’t think it will benefit India much,” he informed.
BRICS consists of members from the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America – the three continents which are different from the continents of the North America and Europe in terms of economic growth and political clout.
Addressing the gathering, Sahni said that only India is doing well among BRICS countries. Matters became worse for others in the recent years with Brazil registering two consecutive years of negative growth and Russia’s economy in total disarray with the collapse of oil prices and European sanctions. South Africa economy grew only by 1.5 per cent. China slowdown is reported to be the slowest in last 25 years.
“BRICS have enormous economic and political potential and, significantly, share a goal to change the existing world order at all levels, from instruments of the global financial and economic system to vital security issues,” he said.
As a multilateral organisation, the BRICS have had moments of success that have built on this economic strength to bring opportunity to both India and the remaining four members. One example of this is the BRICS Development Bank, which is currently headed by the former leader of India’s largest private bank.He further pointed out that India has never been and cannot be the member of the security community of the western democracy which includes countries of Atlantic alliance, Israel, Australia, Japan and South Korea. “We have not been the part of it and we were never considered because we are too large to be considered security community of US or of any other country. We are now large, strong and ever strengthening powers and we just cannot fit in any other security umbrella”, he added.
He also suggested that India has to actually bring cooperative security architecture in Asia pacific adding, “We are moving into a part of the world almost has no architecture institution at all. I argue that India has to put in capital and get American and Chinese on the table.”