TO describe the Donald Trump phenomenon as a tectonic shift in world politics, as India’s foreign minister recently did, is akin to the inebriated Majaaz Lucknavi coming home late at night to find policemen darting their flashlights between the door of the house and the ransacked cupboards left ajar.

The dazed poet stood in a corner and paused thoughtfully. Then sidling up to one of his terrified sisters, declared with utmost authority: “This must be the work of a thief.”

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s faux insights dodge the crunch question that India must face in a volatile world. How to remain in BRICS without annoying Trump? Conversely, how to be with Trump without being assessed as the weak link in BRICS? The question for Jaishankar involves two irreconcilable triangles India finds itself toggling between.

The Russia-India-China (RIC) group was the brainchild of an astute Russian diplomat, the former foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov. The so-called Primakov Triangle, forerunner to BRICS, was inaugurated in 1999 to counter emerging post-Cold War challenges from the West. A parallel triangle was taking shape at India’s behest. Brajesh Mishra, before he became Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s national security adviser in 1998, conjured a ‘triangle of democracies’ from east of Suez to the Indian Ocean — never mind the unabashed conceit it implied towards Iran and other South Asian electoral systems.

Mishra’s India-Israel-US triangle offered as a strategic concept on the one........

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