Two Tables, One Country
BRICS met again this week, and the takeaways were the usual ones: emerging economies, a polite communiqué, talk of countering "western dominance." India was there, as it always is, shaking hands with Russia and China while its own foreign ministry, a few days earlier, was almost certainly issuing statements about the rule of law somewhere else on the calendar.
This is not hypocrisy. It might be something more interesting: the ordinary discipline of a large, argumentative democracy learning to hold two truths without collapsing into either one.
The Train and the Summit
Almost the same week, a Russian strike hit a Ukrainian train shortly after Boris Johnson and a delegation of European officials had left the station. Ask yourself the plain question a child might ask: if the missile does not care whether dignitaries have just left, what exactly does the summit table achieve when the same country that fired it sits at the head of it?
India's answer, unspoken but consistent for years now, is that the table is not an endorsement. It is oxygen for a foreign policy that refuses to be owned by Washington, Moscow, or Beijing alone. That is a defensible strategy. Non-alignment was never a moral position; it was a survival instinct for a country that watched the Cold War carve up smaller nations and decided never to be carved.
What the Hedge Actually Costs
But a hedge is not free. Every seat at Russia's table lends Moscow a little more normalcy at the exact moment its trains-and-stations habit should be making it less normal, not more. The golden rule is a useful test here: would India accept, from any neighbour, the kind of strike that just landed near a station full of departing officials? If the answer is no, then attending a summit chaired in the same spirit is a compromise, and compromises should be named honestly rather than dressed up as strategic wisdom.
The fair verdict is: multi-alignment is a legitimate tool, not a moral shield. India can keep using it, but it should stop pretending the tool has no weight in the other hand.
The Mirror at Home
The more searching question, though, is not about the summit abroad but about the habits at home. A democracy earns the right to sit among autocracies and still call itself different only if its own institutions keep behaving like a democracy's institutions — a press that can ask uncomfortable questions, courts that can rule against the government, an opposition that can actually win somewhere.
India still has all three, unevenly, under real strain, but present. That is the difference worth defending, and it is also the difference worth watching, election after election, the way this newspaper watches every democracy: not for applause, but for the small early signs — a curbed broadcaster here, a jailed critic there — that separate a robust majority from a permanent one.
A Reasoned Stance
So: should a liberal democracy sit at Russia's and China's table? Yes, cautiously, as long as it keeps its own house lit while doing so. The mistake is not attending BRICS. The mistake would be forgetting, back home, why the seat mattered enough to fight for in the first place — a free vote, a free press, a court that can say no to power.
The world's largest democracy does not have to choose between its neighbourhood and its principles. It only has to keep them in the same sentence, out loud, often enough that neither side of the table forgets which one it is dealing with.