CENTURIES before Charles Darwin theorised our shared human evolution from the fish, multiple traditions linked humanity to a single common fold. The 18th BRICS summit in Delhi saw Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the host leaning on the Sanskrit phrase ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ — the world is a family — to underpin the spirit of unity, which unfortunately eludes much of mankind. The ancient aphorism is a good but an overstretched reminder of seeing everybody as an equal human being. Some would say that there was perhaps a greater need to find a phrase that frames all Indians as one family before stretching it to include the world. A problem with citing one’s ancient aphorisms at international conferences is that it begins to resemble the Sadda Mian complex.
Sadda Mian was a roundly admired elderly Afghan member of Bhopal’s royal family. He would walk along the promenade abutting Bhopal’s vast lake called Bhadbhada, which, he decided, was the largest water body in the world. Another characteristic unique to Sadda Mian was that he fed his domesticated quails with his mouth, tucking the tiny grains of food behind the lower lip. The late thespian Dilip Kumar told me about his invitation to Sadda Mian to visit Bombay where the actor took the genial Pathan to watch the Arabian Sea from the city’s Marine Drive. Sadda Mian, his sherwani unbuttoned and fluttering in the breeze, was so awestruck by the sea’s expanse that he exclaimed gently: “Kya haqeeqat hai Bhadbhade ki!” Sadda Mian’s dumbfounded response translates as: ‘Where does any Bhadbhada hold a chance!’
I looked up a few random traditions from across the lands and seas that don’t seem too different in the spirit of acknowledging the world as a family. But few among them, if any, would be found jumping ecstatically as Newton did watching an apple fall from a tree. There was a time in the early days of Narendra Modi’s rule that the foreign ministry printed and distributed copies of the Bhagavad Gita to foreign dignitaries. In the bargain, the ministry displaced coffee-table books of the Taj, Ajanta caves and Madurai temples. I am not aware of Israel handing out the Torah, or the Vatican presenting the Bible to esteemed visitors, nor does Saudi Arabia or Iran make it a point to offer return gifts of the Holy Quran to visiting dignitaries. Or for that matter, would a privileged guest, returning from China, come home with an officially gifted copy of Mao Zedong Thoughts, or more recently Xi Jinping Thoughts? I bought the Xi book on Amazon.
If the world is a family, which it is, talking to the neighbour and sorting out the problem bilaterally is mature.
So yes, the world is a family, but what kind of a family? The BRICS summit sought to address some aspects of the troubling question but, by all accounts, it’s going to be a long trudge. Modi said BRICS has come of age — in the sense that the leaders of the UAE and Iran agreeing to meet and not pressing their case too hard to enable a summit statement was an achievement. One could have accepted the condemnation of the terror attack in Pahalgam and reference to cross-border terrorism as a victory for India. But Pakistan had condemned the attack too. Actually, the BRICS summit in Xiamen in 2017 had gone several steps further when under President Xi’s stewardship it named some extremist outfits allegedly based in Pakistan together with Taliban groups and local security elements for censure.
If the world is a family, which it is, talking to the neighbour and sorting out the problem bilaterally is mature. The world brotherhood will applaud. And, yes, the word ‘family’ loses its meaning when someone is seen standing with an aggressor like Israel and visits the country on the eve of Israel’s assassination of a revered supreme leader of a far friendlier country. Also, if the world is a family, let’s stop patronising lynch mobs against fellow humans everywhere. It’s not unlikely that the BRICS summit’s statement slamming Israel’s occupation of Lebanon was a sign of the coming of age.
Xi Jinping dominated the show. He said BRICS should become a peacemaker. There needs to be peace within the family. Looking objectively at the idea of global brotherhood with all its warts and wrinkles, the Nehruvian ideal of non-alignment was quite representative of the quest. But Xi, too, has made a forceful intervention to make BRICS more proactive in its quest for global brotherhood. And he stated that BRICS must be a “pioneer in upholding peace and stability”, emphasising that the group needs to actively manage global hotspot issues by addressing both their symptoms and root causes. He clearly outlined a four-point plan for West Asia, focusing on peaceful coexistence, respect for national sovereignty, adhering to international law, and regional development. It was Xi who reiterated the necessity of pushing for an immediate ceasefire at all the hotspots in West Asia to establish a lasting two-state solution for Palestine to resolve the nub of the crisis.
Unlike the Sanskrit phrase cited by Modi, which seems ornamental and ill-fitting given India’s domestic and foreign entanglements with strife, the ancient South African ideal of Ubuntu very crucially was at play when apartheid was dismantled in the country. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu leaned on the Zulu phrase ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’. Strikingly similar to the Sanskrit worldview, Ubuntu assured every race and community in the country of equity and equality. The phrase literally means: ‘A person is a person through other persons’ or ‘I am because we are’. The Abrahamic scriptures carry similar messages of a united mankind. The Galatians 3:28 in the Bible says: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This isn’t dissimilar to India’s Maha Upanishad defining narrow-mindedness as calculating ‘this person is a relative, that one is a stranger’. A tricky proposition for Modi to grasp.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2026
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