Trump slams BRICS, but bloc’s founders India and Brazil move to boost trade ties

New Delhi: Even as Donald Trump renewed his offensive on the BRICS, Brazil’s vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, arrived in India on Wednesday to discuss ways to expand bilateral trade, which the two nations – both founder members of the bloc targeted by the US president – decided to raise to $20 billion annually within the next five years.

The high-level engagement between India and Brazil, both founding members of the BRICS, is taking place, even as the US president renewed his offensive against the 10-nation bloc. “…I told anybody who wants to be in BRICS, that's fine, but we're going to put tariffs on your nation. Everybody dropped out. They're all dropping out of BRICS,” Trump said during a meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei in White House in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “BRICS was an attack on the dollar,” he added, using the past tense to refer to an organisation, which had its 17th summit in Brazil on July 6 and 7 this year and would have the 18th in India in 2026.

Trump’s campaign against the BRICS is likely to emerge as a new irritant in India’s relations with the US, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi set to take over the chair of the BRICS from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil next year.

The relations between New Delhi and Washington, D.C., have already been under stress, not only because the US president imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India and his diatribe against India for buying oil from Russia, but also because his growing bonhomie with the civil and military leadership of Pakistan, in disregard of the sensitivities of India, and his repeated claims about brokering the May 10 ceasefire between the two South Asian nations.

Alckmin is also the minister of trade, industry and development in Lula’s government in Brasilia. He will meet Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in New Delhi on Thursday. He had a meeting with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh soon after arriving in New Delhi. He was accompanied by José Múcio Monteiro Filho, the defence minister of Brazil.

Brazil is the largest trade partner of India in South America. The meeting between Alckmin and Goyal on Thursday is likely to focus on meeting the target set by Modi and Lula to raise the annual bilateral trade from $12.20 billion in 2024-25 to $20 billion over the next five years.

Both Brazil and India, the founding members of the BRICS, have been at the receiving end of the tariff wars of the US president.

When Modi was on a tour to Brasilia after attending the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro in July this year, he and Lula took note of the “increasingly challenging global scenario marked by growing protectionism” and reaffirmed their willingness to deepen bilateral economic and trade relations. Jaishankar and Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira were joined by their counterparts from the other BRICS nations in New York on September 27 and expressed concern “over proliferation of trade-restrictive actions, whether in the form of indiscriminate rising of tariffs and non-tariff measures, or protectionism”.

The BRIC comprised Brazil, Russia, India and China till its first expansion to include South Africa in 2010-11. The bloc was then renamed as BRICS. It added Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as new members in 2023-24. Argentina later withdrew its application for membership of the BRICS after Javier Milei took over as the president of the country in December 2023. Saudi Arabia delayed the process of joining the bloc, perceived as a counterweight to the G7. Indonesia joined the BRICS early this year.

Contrary to what Trump claimed on Tuesday, no nation dropped out of the BRICS after he returned to the White House as the 47th US president on January 20, 2025.

Modi, however, last month skipped a virtual meeting of the BRICS leaders convened by Lula to discuss the US president’s tariff wars that disrupted global commerce. Jaishankar stood in for Modi, although President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia were among the leaders who personally attended the meeting.