By Annunthra Rangan
The 18th BRICS Summit, held at Bharat Mandapam on September 12-13, ended a year in which India held the grouping’s chairmanship for the fourth time—and BRICS marked two decades since the acronym first appeared in a Goldman Sachs research note.
Eleven member states signed a 140-paragraph New Delhi Declaration, representing close to 40 percent of global GDP and about half the world’s population. Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first visit to India in seven years. Russian President Vladimir Putin sat beside Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the gala dinner.
The photographs were striking. The communique was substantial. But neither quite captures the more important story.
The real drama of BRICS 2026 unfolded in the months, weeks and even hours before the Declaration was adopted: shuttle diplomacy that reportedly continued until 4 am, differences between Iran and the UAE that threatened to derail consensus, wars that had put members on opposing sides, and a parallel Indian effort to repair relations with Washington while keeping Moscow and Beijing within a carefully managed strategic orbit.
The New Delhi Summit, therefore, was less a declaration of a new world order than a demonstration of how difficult—and perhaps how necessary—it has become to manage the old one.
BRICS was never simply an economic club. From its first leaders’ summit in 2009, it carried an unmistakably political agenda: resistance to a unipolar international order, reform of the UN Security Council and cooperation against terrorism.
What has changed is the scale of the grouping—and consequently the strain on its ability to speak with one voice.
The expansion since 2023, bringing in Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and, subsequently, Indonesia, has transformed what was once a relatively manageable five-member grouping into a much more heterogeneous coalition. The BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in May failed to produce a joint statement, undone in part by the widening gulf between Iran and the UAE over the war in the Gulf.
That experience hung over New Delhi. The fact that the leaders eventually produced a unanimous Declaration was itself a diplomatic achievement.
The Summit’s concrete agenda remained overwhelmingly economic and institutional rather than revolutionary. The Declaration strengthened the mandate of the BRICS Payment Task Force on local-currency settlement, called for reform of IMF quotas, backed efforts to restore the WTO’s dispute-settlement mechanism and criticised carbon-border measures as disguised protectionism.
Artificial intelligence governance was formally added to the agenda, reflecting the recognition that the rules governing the next technological revolution are becoming as strategically important as those governing trade and finance.
There was, significantly, no common currency and no alliance structure.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s formulation that BRICS was “not against anyone” captured India’s preferred interpretation of the grouping. New Delhi is seeking a more representative international system, not replacing one rigid bloc with another.
The prime minister’s description of the existing order as a “pyramid of privilege” that should become a “platform of partnership” was revealing. It was the language of reform rather than revolution.
That distinction matters.
India is too consequential to remain merely a rule-taker, but not yet powerful enough—or willing—to become the sole rule-maker. Its strategy is, therefore, to acquire greater room for manoeuvre by ensuring that it has meaningful relationships with all the major centres of power.
The Summit’s clearest political success came on terrorism. The April 2025 Pahalgam attack was explicitly condemned, with China joining the language without dilution. That was particularly significant coming just days before Xi’s bilateral meeting with Modi and against the backdrop of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s more recent inability to reach comparable consensus.
China and Russia also reiterated support for India’s aspirations for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Such support remains largely rhetorical until institutional reform becomes possible, but its political value should not be dismissed.
The Declaration’s language on unilateral tariffs and secondary sanctions was also clearly directed at Washington, even without naming it.
Yet, perhaps the most consequential achievement was procedural rather than substantive: India managed to bridge the Iran-UAE impasse. Iran wanted BRICS to condemn what it regarded as US-Israeli aggression. The UAE, itself targeted during the conflict and having suspended financial dealings with Tehran, resisted. In a consensus-based grouping, either position could have blocked agreement.
India’s solution was characteristically calibrated: call for “maximum restraint” while allowing members to “recall their respective national positions”. It was diplomatic architecture designed to prevent a collective document from becoming hostage to bilateral conflict.
And then came the revealing moment outside the declaration. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled met on the Summit’s margins—their highest-level contact since the war began. Nothing resembling a reconciliation emerged. But the meeting suggested something perhaps more realistic: a shift towards managing risk rather than resolving every disagreement.
That may be BRICS’s emerging political function. Not a military alliance. Not a coherent anti-Western bloc. Not even necessarily a unified geopolitical camp. Rather, an insurance arrangement in which countries with different interests seek to reduce their exposure to any single dominant power.
The contrast with India’s own relationship with Washington is instructive. The rhetoric of multipolarity in New Delhi existed alongside a remarkable repair of India-US ties. Relations had deteriorated sharply in 2025 after Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Indian goods reaching 50 percent, including a penalty linked to India’s purchases of discounted Russian oil.
India responded by deepening its engagement with Europe. But in February 2026, Trump and Modi agreed to a framework reducing India’s tariff to 18 percent.
Washington presented the agreement as linked to India’s commitment to stop buying Russian oil. Modi’s statement conspicuously did not repeat that formulation.
The apparent ambiguity was not necessarily a contradiction. It was strategic space. India’s idea of autonomy has never meant equidistance. It means having enough relationships, leverage and alternatives that no single relationship becomes indispensable.
The same calculation explains the choreography with Russia. Putin’s visit was outwardly warm. Defence, energy and space cooperation were discussed, and Moscow reiterated that India was free to develop relations with other powers.
But beneath the photographs lies an economic imbalance that Moscow has long wanted corrected.
Indian purchases of Russian oil initially fell sharply after Western sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil and the February tariff agreement with Washington. Yet, the retreat proved tactical. By July, Russian crude had regained a remarkable share of India’s imports.
The larger problem is structural: India buys roughly 12 times more from Russia than it sells to Russia, with crude dominating the relationship. Moscow has repeatedly pushed for greater Indian exports of pharmaceuticals, machinery and other goods.
Russia needs India. India needs Russia. That mutual dependence is precisely why neither side has an incentive to dramatise the friction.
The New Development Bank (NDB) presents another test. Under Dilma Rousseff, the NDB has signalled an ambition to expand local-currency lending during its “second decade”, while its membership has grown with Colombia and Uzbekistan.
But the bank remains constrained by realities beyond the Summit rhetoric. Russian financing has been frozen since 2022 because of sanctions exposure, while the NDB remains far smaller than institutions such as the World Bank or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
For Moscow, its expansion is, therefore, not merely institutional ambition. It is a way of preserving financial options in an international system in which Russia has become increasingly isolated from Western capital.
The Gaza language was considerably sharper than some of the language on the wider regional conflict. The Declaration opposed forced displacement of Palestinians, called for humanitarian access, referred to measures of the International Court of Justice and reaffirmed support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines.
But the contrast was striking. On Palestine, the grouping could speak with relative clarity. On a war involving one of its own members and several strategically important Gulf states, it chose ambiguity. That may be the clearest indication of what BRICS has become.
The New Delhi Summit was not the moment when American or NATO primacy visibly collapsed. Nor did it create a unified alternative to the Western-led international system. Its importance was subtler.
India demonstrated that an increasingly heterogeneous coalition—containing countries aligned with Washington, countries opposed to Washington, states with competing interests, and members recently caught on opposite sides of war—could still produce consensus. That required diplomacy rather than ideology. And that may ultimately be India’s most important contribution to BRICS.
The question now is not whether BRICS can proclaim a “new world order”. It is whether India can continue to manage the overlapping circles of Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and the Gulf without being forced into a choice between them.
New Delhi 2026 did not announce a new world. It showed how the next one may actually be negotiated.
—The writer is an independent researcher. Her research focuses on West Asian studies,
with a particular focus on Iran
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