India's groupings — BRICS, the EU, the Quad, or any that follow — must be judged by one question: what do we learn from them?
Context: Four days ago, the 18th BRICS Summit concluded in New Delhi — India's fourth turn as chair, under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." The leaders of China, Russia and Iran sat in our capital while our trade deficit with China stands at an all-time high. This essay is about how to hold both of those facts in one head without becoming either a nationalist or a naïf. It is the thesis statement of this entire blog — the piece that says what all the hardware detail was for.
Every discussion of Indian foreign policy eventually becomes an argument about identity. Are we a BRICS power or a Western-leaning one? Are we Global South or a US partner? Are we multi-aligned or fence-sitting? These arguments are unresolvable because they are category errors. A country is not its groupings. A country is what it can make — and make increasingly well with each passing decade.
So this essay proposes a single test to replace all the identity arguments, and then applies it ruthlessly — to BRICS first, because the summit just left town, and then to everyone else.
The test: does this relationship make India learn and grow, or does it only make India consume?
I. The Summit in the Mirror
Start with what actually happened. Eleven full members, ten partner countries, roughly half the world's population represented in the room. The chair's theme — resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability — is unimpeachable. And yet the two facts that frame India's relationship with this grouping went unmentioned in the photo-ops.
First: China is not a partner inside BRICS; it is the gravitational center. One country accounts for roughly 70% of the bloc's combined GDP. When BRICS speaks, the mouth is collective but the voice is Beijing's. Second: the economic relationship between India and the grouping's dominant member is not exchange — it is flow. In the fiscal year that just ended, China became India's largest trading partner again, with $151 billion in bilateral trade, and India's exports to China were $19.5 billion while imports were $131.6 billion. The deficit: $112 billion. An all-time high, up from $99 billion the year before, and from $44 billion five years ago.
Trade deficits are not inherently shameful — America ran deficits while building the world's largest economy. But look at what India buys with that $131 billion. It is not consumer trinkets. 98.5% of it is industrial goods. China supplies 43% of India's electronics imports, 40% of its machinery and computer imports, 44% of its organic chemicals — including the active pharmaceutical ingredients our generic drug industry feeds on. These are not purchases. They are dependencies. Each component India imports to assemble into something else is a small lease payment on someone else's capability.
And what flows back? What does India learn from this relationship? Here is the uncomfortable answer, and it is not a moral complaint but an accounting one: nothing that compounds. China sells India finished goods and protected intellectual property, and has never transferred a process technology to India — not one. There is no Chinese Dholera. There is no Chinese-assisted RISC-V program. There is no joint fab venture. The relationship, in strictly industrial terms, is that of a supplier to a customer — and the supplier is careful never to teach the customer to be a competitor. This is not villainy. This is exactly what India would do in China's position. It is simply what the test of "learn and grow" reveals: with respect to the bloc's largest member, India only consumes.
Russia, the other founding anchor, is a different story with the same ending. Historically, the Soviet Union and Russia were India's single greatest source of technology transfer — licensed Su-30 production, the BrahMos joint venture, cryogenic engines before politics intervened. That inheritance deserves respect, and the discount on crude is real money. But look at the direction of travel: Russia's technological base is sanctions-hollowed, its semiconductor industry is generations behind, its flagship co-development projects with India have collapsed or stalled, and its remaining leverage is energy and a Security Council vote. A partner whose technology is depreciating cannot be the pillar of a learn-and-grow strategy, whatever sentimental capital exists. Imports from Russia actually fell this past fiscal year. The market is already answering the question diplomacy has not.
II. The Thesis
Strip the emotion from it and the strategy writes itself:
Reduce the import of things that are finished.
Import, aggressively and from anyone who sells, the things that make things — tools, process knowledge, licenses, know-how.
Do this until no single country holds a chokepoint on India's critical inputs.
Do it with friends, with rivals, with frenemies. The seller's feelings do not matter. The buyer's learning does.
Every country that ever climbed from poor to rich did exactly this, and no country that did the opposite ever did. It is the most consistently successful economic strategy of the last two centuries, hiding in plain sight because each practitioner pretended it was something else — national revival, socialism, self-reliance, open markets. Underneath the ideology, the machine was the same.
III. The Proven Path
Japan, after 1868, sent students and engineers to every Western power with a checkbook and a notebook, bought machines and curricula wholesale, and called the doctrine "Western technique, Japanese spirit." Within two generations it was defeating a Western navy at sea.
Korea, in the 1970s and 80s, was poorer per capita than Ghana. Its champions licensed what they could not invent — Samsung's early DRAM designs licensed from an American firm, Hyundai's memory partnership with Texas Instruments — absorbed the process, and iterated past the teachers. Today Samsung is the teacher, and the licensing flows the other way.
Taiwan, in 1976, sent a government research team to America to bring back CMOS process technology, then did it again at company scale: when TSMC was an unknown startup with no customers and no credibility, Philips of the Netherlands took an equity stake in exchange for technology and manufacturing know-how. That stake, made to help a company no one believed in, became one of the most profitable investments in corporate history — and Taiwan became the indispensable nation of the semiconductor age.
China, from the 1990s, ran "market for technology" joint ventures at industrial scale, required transfer as the price of access, recruited diaspora engineers back by the tens of thousands, and when doors were closed, walked through windows. Its high-speed rail went from imported Kawasaki and Siemens trains to the world's largest domestic industry in fifteen years. Its semiconductor effort took longer and cost more, but the pattern held: the goal was never to buy chips. It was to become a country that makes chipmaking tools.
Notice what is absent from every one of these stories: dogma about groupings. Japan learned from the very powers it distrusted. Taiwan's foundational technology came through a Dutch company. Korea learned from Japan — a former colonizer. China's great technology partner of the 1990s and 2000s was America, its strategic rival. The practitioners of learn-and-grow did not ask whether the seller shared their values. They asked whether the purchase transferred capability. That is the whole of the doctrine, and the rest is commentary.
IV. India's Own Two Stories
India has run this experiment twice, once failing and once succeeding, and the difference between the two runs is the most important policy lesson this country owns.
The failure was the License Raj. From the 1950s, India pursued import substitution as dogma: protect domestic producers from foreign competition indefinitely, and capability would somehow follow. It did not follow. Protected from both competition and consequence, Indian industry had no reason to absorb anything, and the symbol of the era is the Ambassador — a 1956 Morris Oxford produced with minor changes until 2014 — while Japan was building Toyota and Korea was building Hyundai. The lesson is precise and uncomfortable: protection without discipline produces consumption of another kind — the consumption of one's own complacency. India did not fail at import substitution because it protected industry. Korea protected industry more aggressively than India did. India failed because it protected industry unconditionally, asking nothing in return.
The success was ISRO. In the early 1990s, India contracted with Russia's Glavkosmos for cryogenic engine technology — the one piece of the launch vehicle stack India lacked. The United States, enforcing non-proliferation rules, pressured and sanctioned the deal until the technology transfer was killed. India's response was not to find another seller. It was to build the cryogenic engine itself. Twenty years of patient work later, the indigenous upper stage flies routinely. The denial became the forcing function — and this is the deepest insight in the story: a learn-and-grow nation converts even refusal into capability. The sanctions India fought were, in the longest view, the finest technology-transfer program ISRO ever ran.
Between these poles sits Maruti-Suzuki — forty years of joint venture that genuinely transferred manufacturing culture, quality discipline and supplier ecosystems to India, and became the largest carmaker in the country. It proves the other half of the thesis: when a partner does teach, India learns as well as anyone. The problem is never the capacity to learn. It is the discipline to demand it.
V. The Discipline That Makes It Work
East Asia's practitioners added the ingredient India's first attempt lacked: conditionality. Korea and Taiwan gave their champions protection, cheap capital and a captive market — and attached expiry dates and export targets. Firms that failed to learn lost the protection. The state was an investor, not a patron: it bought capability and demanded returns.
Any Indian version — and the sovereign computing ecosystem sketched in this blog's earlier posts would be exactly that — must be built with the discipline wired in from day one. If the government mandates Indian hardware for its employees, that mandate must carry milestones: domestic value-addition that rises on a published schedule, components that localize tier by tier, and eventually, export performance. A mandate without a learning curve is not a strategy; it is the License Raj with better branding. The point of protecting a market is to create the space in which learning happens — and the moment learning stops being the condition of protection, the policy has become its own objective and must be dismantled.
VI. The Three Tiers of Substitution
"Reduce end-product imports" is the right instinct but too blunt a tool, because India's dependency is mostly not end products — it is components. The $131 billion of Chinese imports are overwhelmingly inputs that feed India's own factories. Tariffing them without a plan would simply tariff India's own manufacturing. The strategy therefore has to cut the problem into three tiers, each with its own instrument:
| Tier | Examples | Instrument | Time Horizon |
|---|---|---|---|
| End products | Laptops, phones, finished electronics, servers | Substitute directly — domestic SoCs on domestic nodes, government procurement preference, the mandate | 2028–2032 |
| Components & industrial inputs | Display panels, PCBs, memory, power ICs, connectors, chemicals | Build domestically tier by tier — fab matures from 55/90nm through 28nm to 22nm FD-SOI; open-silicon IP fills the catalogue | 2028–2035 |
| Tools, process & knowledge | EDA licenses, lithography equipment, process transfer, IP licenses, research association, engineering talent | Import aggressively — forever. Never substitute this tier; even the US imports its lithography from the Netherlands and its leading-edge chips from Taiwan | Permanent |
The third tier is where dogma does the most damage, in both directions. The protectionist who wants to substitute tools ends up with the Ambassador — a country that makes its own bad versions of yesterday's machines. The free-trader who happily imports finished goods while neglecting tool imports ends up with India's present — a brilliant services economy riding on imported hardware. The first refuses to learn; the second refuses to grow. The synthesis is a nation that buys capability the way a serious company buys R&D: on purpose, with budgets, with absorption plans.
VII. Pragmatic, Not Dogmatic: Groupings as Instruments
Now the question the summit forces: what should India do with BRICS?
The honest answer is that this is a genuinely contested question among serious people, and both camps have real arguments.
The exit camp says: the bloc's largest member dominates it economically, has never transferred a technology to India, actively enables India's principal strategic threat, and the grouping's expansion — Iran's membership, the partner-country category sweeping in Belarus, Cuba, Kazakhstan — tilts it toward the sanctions-resistance club that India has no business cosplaying membership of. Meanwhile, association carries costs: Washington has already threatened hundred-percent tariffs over BRICS de-dollarization talk, and India has trade friction of its own to manage without inheriting bloc baggage. Exit would clarify. Let BRICS become what its center of gravity pulls it toward, and let India stand apart from it.
The engagement camp says: BRICS has no defense clause, no common market, no binding commitments — the cost of the membership is nearly zero, while the chair is worth holding. Exit would hand Global South convening leadership to China outright, removing the one in-room counterweight at precisely the moment India is chairing the table. The forum has delivered things India wants — formal backing for its Security Council aspirations, counter-terrorism language, a development bank — and blocking the bloc's anti-Western framing from inside has value the outside cannot replicate. India's line, in the formulation diplomats actually use, is that BRICS should be non-Western but not anti-Western — and staying is how that line is enforced.
Both camps are arguing about identity. The learn-and-grow test dissolves the argument, because it does not ask whether BRICS is good or bad. It asks: what does India learn here?
Applied honestly, the answer for BRICS today is: little, in industrial terms — nothing from China, nothing from Russia that depreciates slower than it erodes. But not nothing at all: the chair is a stage; the members include Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, the Gulf states and much of Africa — markets, resource partners, and buyers of precisely the finished electronics India will eventually make at Dholera. A pragmatic chairing of BRICS treats the grouping as a sales channel and a diplomatic stage — never as a supplier of capability, because it has none to sell that India should want. That is not friendship and it is not hostility. It is what every serious power does with every grouping: extract the value, refuse the baggage.
And the same test, applied without sentiment to everyone else:
- The European Union — currently the world's densest concentration of learn-and-grow opportunity for India. The FTA is essentially done. Association with Horizon Europe, the €93.5 billion research program, is in formal negotiation. The TTC has explicit semiconductor, HPC, quantum and 6G cooperation tracks. Europe is open-sourcing its public sector onto the very stack this blog has been speccing — Linux, LibreOffice, Nextcloud — and its silicon research (the eProcessor, the 22nm FD-SOI ecosystem) is open-licensed. India should learn from Europe with both hands.
- The United States — the deepest technology pool on earth, the source of EDA tools and the RISC-V ecosystem's commercial muscle, and currently courting India as the counter-China pillar. The learn-and-grow exposure is enormous and the window is open precisely as long as India is seen as a counterweight rather than a competitor. Front-load it.
- Taiwan and Japan — the quietest and most important thread. India's fab exists because of a Taiwanese process transfer (PSMC), and its deepest manufacturing-culture transfer came from a Japanese joint venture (Suzuki-Maruti, forty years running). Both want geographic hedging of their own; both are willing to teach. These are the relationships to deepen without publicity.
- Russia — a relationship to manage with respect and clear eyes: energy at a discount, legacy defense spares, a Security Council vote, and no future in technology transfer. Consume less, sentiment less, and let the arithmetic do the negotiating.
None of this requires choosing a bloc. It requires a spreadsheet.
VIII. The Frenemy Window
One more timing point, and it is the most perishable fact in this essay. India is currently courted by every side at once — the US wants its counterweight, Europe wants its market and talent, Russia wants any market at all, Japan and Taiwan want their hedge. This four-way courtship is a temporary geopolitical condition, not a permanent feature of the world. The historical pattern is unambiguous: the moment a rising power is reclassified from counterweight to competitor, the tool taps get restricted. It happened to Japan in the 1980s and it is happening to China today.
The frenemy window argues for front-loading: sign the process licenses, the research associations, the equipment contracts and the university partnerships now, while every seller has its own reasons to want India to succeed. Capability, once imported, cannot be un-imported — sanctions arrived too late for ISRO's cryogenic engine precisely because the learning had already happened. The same logic, run in reverse, is the whole game: get the knowledge inside the border before the world's mood changes.
IX. What This Looks Like in Silicon
Every post in this series has been an application of this thesis without naming it, so let the thesis name them:
- The Dholera fab is a learn-and-grow transaction — a Taiwanese process transfer that converts a $112 billion component dependency into a domestic capability, tier by tier, node by node.
- The open-silicon catalogue — the CPU cores, the GPU, the NPU, the NVMe and display controllers, every block from the earlier survey — is learn-and-grow in its purest form: technology transfer with no counterparty, no export control, no negotiation. Open source is the one channel where the frenemy question never even arises, which is precisely why it anchors this blog's hardware roadmap.
- The eProcessor relationship — European research, openly licensed, validated on the exact 22nm process generation Dholera will eventually run — is learn-and-grow with a willing teacher, acquired for the price of participation.
- The modular laptop strategy — start at mature nodes, ship a real product, swap the compute module as the fab climbs — is learn-and-grow sequenced for a country: learn on cheap silicon, grow into expensive silicon.
- The Ubuntu + LibreOffice + Nextcloud stack is learn-and-grow software: consume nobody's finished product, adopt everyone's open capability.
The mandate proposed in an earlier post — Indian hardware for Indian government employees — is the demand-side instrument that makes the whole machine turn. But per Section V, it must carry learning curves and expiry dates, or it will be remembered as this generation's License Raj. That is the difference between a sovereign ecosystem and a subsidy farm, and the difference will be decided by whether the discipline is written into the design.
X. The Goal: No Chokepoint, Not Autarky
A final calibration, because "self-sufficiency" is the word that ruins these debates. Literal self-sufficiency does not exist at any level of the technology stack and never has. The United States imports its leading-edge chips from Taiwan and its lithography from the Netherlands. Taiwan imports its equipment from America. Japan imports its rare earths from China. The entire system is a lattice of mutual dependencies; the only question is which dependencies can be weaponized against you.
So the goal must be stated precisely: no single country above roughly 30% of any critical input category. Not zero imports — dispersed imports. Not self-reliance — chokepoint-immunity. A country that cannot be coerced through its supply chain can afford any ideology it likes about its groupings, because the groupings no longer decide anything material. That is the finish line. Everything in this essay is just the route.
The summit has left Delhi. The photographs will be forgotten in a week; the deficit will not. A pragmatic nation does not ask which club it belongs to — it asks what each relationship teaches, and it grades every one of them, every year, on that single question. Learn and grow, or merely consume: that is the whole of the test. India has run both programs before. One gave it the Ambassador. The other gave it a Mars mission for less than the cost of a Hollywood space film. The difference was never ability. It was the refusal to confuse belonging with building.
Sources and data referenced in this essay: Government of India trade data for FY2025-26 as reported by the commerce ministry (bilateral trade with China of $151.1 billion, deficit of $112.16 billion); Global Trade Research Initiative analysis of DGCI&S data on India-China sectoral dependence; official BRICS 2026 chairship materials (Government of India / PIB) on membership, chairship theme and summit schedule; public reporting on the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, September 12-13, 2026; European Commission releases on the India-EU Trade and Technology Council, the India-EU FTA, and Horizon Europe association negotiations; historical accounts of Japanese industrialization, the Korea-Texas Instruments and Hyundai memory partnerships, the RCA-ITRI technology transfer of 1976-77, the Philips-TSMC investment of 1987, the Glavkosmos cryogenic engine episode and ISRO's indigenous cryogenic program, and the Suzuki-Maruti joint venture. Contested characterizations (including China's dominance of BRICS and the merits of exit versus engagement) are argued positions, presented here as the author's assessment, not established fact.
