Every diplomatic beat reporter in the western hemisphere is currently hyperventilating over the latest handshakes between New Delhi and Moscow. S. Jaishankar sits down with Vladimir Putin, drops a polite invite for the upcoming BRICS summit, throws in a nod to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the media instantly reaches for the smelling salts. Headlines scream about shifting global axes, a unified anti-western economic bloc, and the imminent death of the dollar.
It is all a distraction.
I have spent the last fifteen years tracking statecraft and cross-border capital flows, watching diplomats posture for domestic consumption while their finance ministries quietly trade in whatever currency solves their immediate liquidity crunch. The lazy consensus is that India is anchoring a grand alternative world order. The reality is far more transactional, deeply messy, and entirely devoid of ideological romance.
Let us dismantle the mythology brick by brick.
The Myth of the Monolithic Bloc
Look at the underlying mechanics of BRICS and the SCO. You have a collection of sovereign states with active border skirmishes, competing territorial ambitions, and fundamentally incompatible economic models. India and China share a heavily militarized Himalayan frontier that thaws just enough every few years for another standoff. Russia is currently locked into a junior-partner economic dependency on Beijing that makes Moscow nervous, even if Putin cannot afford to show it.
To pretend these nations form a coherent geopolitical alliance is like calling a crowded subway car a hiking club because everyone is heading in the same general direction. They are not marching together; they are elbowing each other for space.
When Jaishankar extends an invitation to Putin for the summit in India, analysts lose their minds over the diplomatic optics. They forget that India's foreign policy has never been about choosing camps; it has been about weaponizing non-alignment for maximum national advantage. New Delhi buys discounted Russian crude not out of ideological solidarity with the Kremlin, but because Indian refineries need cheap feedstock to keep domestic inflation low while selling refined fuels back to western markets at a markup.
That is not a revolution against the western liberal order. That is high-stakes arbitrage.
Follow the Ledger Not the Communiques
If you want to understand what actually matters during these high-profile summits, stop reading the joint statements. They are written by committee to sound impressive while committing nobody to anything legally binding. Instead, look at the bilateral trade settlement mechanisms and central bank reserve allocations.
For all the noise about de-dollarization, local currency trade between India and Russia hit a massive wall because India runs a severe trade deficit with Russia. Moscow accumulates billions of rupees in Indian banks that it simply cannot deploy efficiently because India maintains strict capital controls and does not offer deep, liquid sovereign debt instruments denominated in rupees that Russia actually wants to hold.
You cannot build a reserve currency out of trade imbalances and capital controls. Until the proponents of these alternative summits explain how structural trade imbalances get resolved without a trusted global liquidity provider, every declaration of a new economic architecture is just political theater.
Imagine a scenario where a global merchant has to swap rupees for rubles, only to find that the only thing those rubles can buy is more oil they cannot export elsewhere. The friction kills the velocity of trade. Real power relies on liquid, open markets where capital moves without bureaucratic permission. BRICS offers the exact opposite: heavy state direction and administrative friction disguised as financial liberation.
The Domestic Audience Trap
Why do these summits persist if the macro-economic substance is so weak? Because foreign policy is domestic politics.
In New Delhi, hosting high-profile summits like BRICS and the SCO serves a vital domestic narrative. It projects an image of India as a central pole in a multipolar world, a global heavyweight capable of shaking hands with Washington and Moscow on the same afternoon. It flatters domestic pride and reassures voters that their nation commands respect at the top table.
In Moscow, these meetings are oxygen. They allow the Kremlin to broadcast domestic media clips showing the Russian president shaking hands with leaders of the world's most populous democracy, proving to the domestic audience that western sanctions failed to isolate the state.
In Beijing, these platforms are useful levers to dilute American hegemony without triggering a direct military confrontation.
None of this requires a shared vision of the future. It requires overlapping inconveniences and a shared desire to hedge against American overreach.
The Uncomfortable Downside of Strategic Autonomy
My contrarian take comes with a heavy caveat. India’s multi-alignment strategy—welcoming Putin while buying western defense hardware and maintaining intelligence-sharing pipelines with the Quad—is brilliant tactical execution, but it carries a brutal long-term cost.
When you try to be friends with everyone, you eventually convince no one of your ultimate loyalty when a genuine crisis hits. I have seen corporate conglomerates try this exact positioning during industry shifts; they play all sides until a market shock forces a binary choice, and they find themselves stranded with no allies who trust them implicitly.
India's balancing act works brilliantly during a period of fragmented, messy globalization. But if the global economy splits into harder technological and financial blocs, fence-sitting stops being a superpower and starts becoming a liability. You cannot indefinitely extract benefits from opposing systems without eventually paying an integration toll.
Stop looking at the BRICS and SCO summits as the birth pangs of a new world order. They are annual networking events for state actors managing their own vulnerabilities.
The next time you read a breathless analysis about how a handshake in Moscow or New Delhi is rewriting global history, check who is actually moving the capital, and ask yourself what they are trying to distract you from at home.
