By Inderjit Badhwar
There are summits that produce headlines, summits that produce declarations, and occasionally summits that reveal something larger than either. The 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi belongs to the third category.
At first glance, the familiar statistics tell the story: 11 member states, nearly 40 percent of global GDP, about half the world’s population, a 140-paragraph declaration, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first visit to India in seven years and Russian President Vladimir Putin seated beside Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the gala dinner.
But the photographs and the communique are only the visible surface. The more interesting story is what had to happen underneath to produce that surface.
BRICS is no longer the relatively compact five-country grouping that emerged in 2009. Its expansion has brought in countries with radically different political systems, economic interests and strategic calculations. Some are close to Washington. Others are determined to challenge the US-led order. Some depend heavily on Western markets. Others are under Western sanctions. Some are partners. Others have been, at moments, adversaries. And yet, they were able to agree. That is where India’s role becomes important.
The New Delhi Summit should not be read as evidence that the Western-led international system has suddenly collapsed. Nor should BRICS be romanticised as a ready-made alternative world order. It is neither. Its real significance is more complicated.
BRICS increasingly resembles a mechanism through which countries can insure themselves against strategic vulnerability. Local-currency trade, alternatives to dollar dependence, reform of global financial institutions, resistance to unilateral sanctions, AI governance and greater representation in international institutions all belong to the same broad impulse: no major country wants its economic or political future to depend entirely on decisions made elsewhere.
India understands that impulse particularly well. But India also understands the danger of turning it into an ideological crusade.
That is why Prime Minister Modi’s insistence that BRICS is “not against anyone” was more than diplomatic politeness. It described India’s own position. New Delhi wants reform without rupture; greater influence without entering another rigid bloc; strategic partnerships without strategic captivity.
This is easier to say than to practise. The contradictions are enormous.
India has been simultaneously repairing its relationship with Washington after a bruising tariff confrontation, maintaining its historically important relationship with Moscow, managing a difficult but indispensable relationship with Beijing, engaging Iran and deepening its partnerships with the Gulf. These relationships do not always fit comfortably together. Indeed, some of them are structurally incompatible.
That became dramatically clear in the negotiations over the New Delhi Declaration. Iran wanted the BRICS document to condemn American and Israeli actions. The UAE, having itself been targeted and having suspended financial dealings with Tehran, was unwilling to endorse such language.
A weaker chair might have allowed the disagreement to become a rupture. India instead found the diplomatic middle ground: language calling for restraint while allowing individual members to retain their own national positions.
This may sound like semantic manoeuvring. It is actually the essence of multilateral diplomacy.
The achievement of diplomacy is often not persuading everybody to believe the same thing. It is finding language that allows countries that profoundly disagree to continue sitting at the same table. That is particularly important in a world increasingly defined by geopolitical fragmentation.
The Summit’s significance, therefore, lies partly in what it tells us about India’s changing place in the international system.
For decades, India was often described as a major power waiting for its moment. Today, that description is increasingly inadequate. India is becoming a power whose choices affect the calculations of others.
Washington wants India as a strategic partner. Moscow wants to preserve a relationship it regards as indispensable. Beijing cannot ignore India’s economic and geopolitical weight. The Gulf states see India simultaneously as a market, partner and stabilising force. The developing world increasingly sees New Delhi as a voice that can speak both to the West and to the Global South.
That position brings influence. But it also brings an extraordinary burden of balancing. India cannot afford to become so close to one pole that it loses leverage with another. Nor can it allow strategic autonomy to become an excuse for avoiding difficult choices when principles and national interests genuinely collide. The BRICS Summit demonstrated both the opportunity and the danger.
On terrorism, India secured unusually significant consensus, including China’s explicit participation in the condemnation of the Pahalgam attack. On India’s aspiration for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, China and Russia again offered support. On Palestine, the declaration adopted stronger language on forced displacement, humanitarian access and a two-state solution.
Yet, on the broader Middle East conflict, where BRICS members themselves were deeply divided, the language became carefully qualified. That contrast tells us something important.
Multilateralism works best not when everyone agrees, but when everyone has sufficient incentive to prevent disagreement from destroying the institution. India’s challenge is to make that incentive durable.
The same applies to the economic ambitions of BRICS. Local-currency settlement, financial diversification and a stronger New Development Bank are potentially more consequential than the Summit’s political rhetoric. But institutions require capital, credibility and scale. They cannot be built merely through declarations.
That is where the next decade will be decided. Perhaps, then, the most useful way to understand New Delhi 2026 is not as the birth of a rival to the existing world order, but as a rehearsal for the world that is already emerging.
It is a world of overlapping partnerships rather than permanent alliances; of countries hedging rather than choosing; of economic interdependence coexisting with geopolitical rivalry; and of middle and rising powers demanding greater agency without necessarily wanting confrontation.
India is unusually well positioned for that world. But position is not destiny.
The test will be whether New Delhi can continue to turn its many relationships into strategic leverage without allowing those relationships to become strategic liabilities. That is why this BRICS Summit matters.
The declaration may eventually become another document in the archives of international diplomacy. The diplomatic method displayed in New Delhi could prove much more enduring.
The new world order, if it comes, may not arrive with a bang. It may be negotiated—one carefully chosen word, one difficult compromise and one improbable handshake at a time.
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