As India hosts the 18th BRICS Summit, its challenge is to turn the grouping’s enlarged weight into practical choices – without allowing it to harden into another geopolitical bloc.
When the leaders of the eleven-member BRICS gather at Bharat Mandapam on September 12-13, India will chair the grouping for the fourth time, in a year marking two decades since the format began taking shape. New Delhi’s theme – “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” – is deliberately practical. It reflects a broader Indian calculation: BRICS serves India best when it creates working mechanisms and expands strategic choice, and worst when it becomes a platform for confrontation with the West.
The case for BRICS is not difficult to make. Its members account for nearly half the world’s population and about two-fifths of global output at purchasing-power parity, yet their institutional voice remains disproportionately small. At the IMF, the United States still holds 16.49 per cent of voting power – enough to block decisions requiring an 85 per cent supermajority – while India has only 2.63 per cent. The gap between economic weight and institutional influence remains one of the strongest arguments for reform of the post-war order. India’s objective, however, should be reform rather than replacement: a more plural system, not a rival hierarchy dominated by another great power.
India’s clearest opportunity lies in making BRICS practical. During its chairship, New Delhi has pushed proposals ranging from a startup innovation fund and incubator network to new MSME financing mechanisms, climate-resilient agriculture, health surveillance and disaster-warning cooperation. Some remain proposals rather than finished institutions, but that distinction itself offers a useful test for the summit: can BRICS turn declarations into mechanisms that endure after leaders leave Delhi? These areas also play to India’s strengths in digital public infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, service delivery and affordable technology.
The New Development Bank offers the most concrete example. By June 2026, it had approved 141 projects worth about $44 billion; India was its second-largest recipient, with 35 approved projects worth roughly $10.5 billion. More significant than the headline numbers is the Bank’s proposed first onshore rupee-denominated “Maharaja Bond”, being advanced with Indian and RBI support. A multilateral institution that can raise and lend rupees for Indian infrastructure reduces exchange-rate risk and deepens domestic capital markets. That is a tangible national interest – and a far more credible form of financial diversification than slogans about replacing the dollar.
The same realism should guide BRICS payment cooperation. India has good reason to support faster settlement in national currencies and links among payment systems. But cheaper transactions are not the same as “de-dollarisation”, let alone a common BRICS currency. Eleven economies with different capital controls, exchange-rate regimes and strategic alignments are nowhere near a monetary union. Nor should India swap dependence on Western financial rails for dependence on a Chinese-controlled platform. The objective should be interoperability with safeguards: more options, lower costs and greater resilience without surrendering data security or monetary autonomy.
Here lies the central structural challenge: China. India-China goods trade reached $151.1 billion in 2025-26, but India’s deficit widened to $112.16 billion. The imbalance reflects dependence on Chinese machinery, electronics, components and industrial inputs. More intra-BRICS trade, without diversification, could therefore deepen India’s vulnerability. With China due to chair BRICS in 2027, New Delhi should seek continuity in functional projects – development finance, health, climate resilience, payments and trade facilitation – while avoiding the illusion that institutional cooperation amounts to strategic convergence.
Expansion brings a second challenge. The entry of Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia has broadened BRICS’s reach across energy, finance, Africa and maritime Asia; it has also introduced more rivalries into the room. The May foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi ended with a Chair’s Statement rather than a conventional joint declaration, amid differences, including between Iran and the UAE. The lesson is not that expansion has failed, but that unanimity will become harder. BRICS may work better through flexible coalitions of willing members on specific issues, while reserving consensus for genuinely common positions.
Events around the Strait of Hormuz make this problem immediate. Renewed US-Iran clashes have pushed oil to six-week highs and slowed shipping through the Gulf. For India, a major energy importer, higher crude prices feed directly into inflation, the current account, and pressure on the rupee; the RBI has had to intervene as oil prices have risen. A BRICS that includes Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE should, in theory, have unusual capacity for regional dialogue. Yet those same divisions may make collective diplomacy hardest precisely when secure energy and maritime flows matter most.
India must therefore resist the turn toward BRICS as an anti-Western bloc. New Delhi is active across BRICS, the Quad, the G20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, while deepening ties with the United States, Europe, Japan, the Gulf and the Global South. That is not inconsistency. It is strategic autonomy suited to a multipolar age.
The realistic ambition for BRICS is optionality: more sources of development finance, more payment channels, stronger supply chains, and a louder voice for developing countries, without exchanging one dependence for another. The measure of the New Delhi summit should not be the vigour of its rhetoric against Washington or the West, but whether it leaves behind institutions that work on an ordinary day – an NDB bond issued in rupees, workable payment links, financing for smaller firms, stronger health and disaster networks, and more balanced trade.
If India can keep BRICS development-centred, non-hegemonic, and open to engagement with the wider world, it can make the grouping an instrument of multipolarity without turning it into another pole of confrontation. That would serve both India’s national interest and BRICS’s long-term credibility.
