The 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi should not be judged by whether it moved the grouping closer to becoming a cohesive geopolitical or economic bloc. That is neither realistic nor necessarily in India’s interest. Its greater significance lies in demonstrating how BRICS can expand Global South agency, support institutional reform, and give India greater room for manoeuvre in an increasingly fragmented international order.
From an Indian perspective, the most useful synthesis is that BRICS is a non-Western platform, not an anti-Western bloc; a vehicle for reform without rupture; and a promoter of multipolarity without replacing Western dominance with Chinese dominance. Nonetheless, there is a need for caution, primarily due to structural weaknesses within BRICS and the risks posed by Chinese economic power and agenda-setting dominance. The Delhi Summit’s principal achievement was therefore less about dramatic institutional change than about keeping BRICS open, flexible, and politically diverse.
India’s BRICS Strategy: Reform Without Rupture
New Delhi seeks a more representative international system, a stronger voice for the Global South, and protection against economic coercion. Yet it has little interest in abandoning the Western markets, capital, technology, and institutions that remain critical to India’s economic transformation. This explains India’s insistence that BRICS is “not against anyone,” along with the careful framing of the summit’s outcomes.
Indian takeaways from the summit reflect this balancing act. New Delhi resisted attempts to turn BRICS into an explicitly anti-American platform. There was no endorsement of a common BRICS currency or a dramatic declaration of de-dollarisation. Instead, the emphasis remained on national-currency settlements, cross-border payment mechanisms, resilient supply chains, digital public infrastructure, and reform of institutions such as the UN, IMF, and World Bank.
India’s objective is not to replace one dominant order with another but to broaden the range of choices available to states. In practice, this means using BRICS to advance incremental changes in global governance while preserving access to Western finance, technology, and markets. It is a strategy of diversification rather than decoupling.
BRICS: More Consequential Than Cohesive
The Delhi Summit highlights an important paradox: BRICS is becoming more consequential without becoming more cohesive. Its members have sharply divergent political systems, economic structures, security interests, regional rivalries, relationships with the United States and China, and approaches to Russia and the international financial system.
Against this background, the unanimous New Delhi Declaration was a diplomatic achievement. Consensus was possible largely because the Declaration relied on generalised, non-binding language. Israel was singled out in the context of West Asia, but there was not a word on Ukraine. This reveals both the value and the limitations of BRICS: it can articulate broad principles and provide diplomatic space, but it is much less capable of resolving conflicts, assigning responsibility, or enforcing collective decisions.
BRICS is more suited to:
- maintaining dialogue.
- articulating broad principles.
- providing diplomatic space.
- creating economic and technological initiatives.
- strengthening Global South representation.
It is much less capable of:
- resolving conflicts.
- assigning responsibility.
- enforcing collective decisions.
- creating binding economic commitments.
This institutional looseness suits India. A highly cohesive BRICS could become a geopolitical bloc, whereas a flexible grouping allows members to cooperate without surrendering their independent foreign policies.
The Economic Promise and the Institutional Reality
BRICS offers substantial opportunities in areas such as MSMEs, infrastructure finance, digital systems, technology, supply chains, critical minerals, energy, and food security. These are areas where BRICS could deliver tangible value for the Global South; India’s chair delivered more than 50 concrete outcomes across these domains.
However, analysts highlight the gap between rhetoric and implementation. The BRICS financial architecture remains underdeveloped. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement has not emerged as a meaningful crisis-management instrument. The New Development Bank remains constrained by the realities of international financial markets and the need to maintain a strong credit profile.
The absence of a common currency or an explicit de-dollarisation commitment should be understood realistically. BRICS members have incentives to reduce vulnerabilities linked to dependence on Western financial systems, but they lack the institutional, financial, or political cohesion required to build a comprehensive alternative. The more realistic trajectory is therefore interoperable payment systems, local-currency transactions, alternative financing, and supply-chain diversification. This incremental approach aligns with India’s preference for practical reform over systemic rupture.
The Central China Question
The most important strategic caveat is China. As a major economic and military power, China has advantages within BRICS across manufacturing, trade, infrastructure, critical minerals, supply chains, technology, and financial resources. Consequently, an enlarged BRICS does not automatically translate into greater Indian influence.
Assessments such as “Takashashila Institutions’ “Eye on China” highlight how apparently neutral formulations on critical minerals, trade, and other economic issues can sometimes accommodate Chinese interests. The key question, therefore, is not who “controls” BRICS, but what kind of multipolarity it will help create. China is likely to favour an order in which Western dominance is reduced and its own economic and political weight increases. India, by contrast, seeks a system in which several centres of power retain meaningful influence without any one in particular dominating.
India–China: Competitive Coexistence
The Modi–Xi interaction at the Summit reinforces this broader approach. The meeting was significant because it restored political space for engagement after years of tension. The emphasis on business links, mobility, cultural exchanges, trade imbalance, and market access suggests a move towards ‘managed stabilisation’ rather than a comprehensive strategic reset.
India has not abandoned competition with China, nor has it assumed that economic engagement will eliminate strategic mistrust. The emerging model is more accurately described as coexistence, competition, and selective cooperation. BRICS provides an institutional environment in which this model can operate. India can engage China on economic and Global South issues through BRICS while competing with it in the Indo-Pacific and managing the boundary relationship.
Russia and the Preservation of Strategic Autonomy
India continues to view Russia as an important defence partner, energy supplier, and strategic, technological, and industrial partner. Despite this, New Delhi has not endorsed Moscow’s more confrontational conception of BRICS as an alternative order opposed to Western institutions.
Indian strategic autonomy does not mean equidistance from all major powers. It means retaining the freedom to maintain relationships with different centres of power in line with Indian interests. India can therefore maintain its relationship with Russia while deepening relations with the United States and Europe; engage with China in BRICS while competing with it elsewhere; and cooperate with Japan and Australia without joining a formal anti-China bloc.
The 2027 Chinese Presidency: The Critical Test
The real test of India’s Delhi strategy will come during China’s BRICS presidency in 2027. Beijing is likely to favour further expansion of BRICS, stronger political coordination, greater use of non-Western financial mechanisms, deeper economic integration, reduced dependence on Western financial systems, and a stronger political role for BRICS in global governance.
Many of these objectives are not inherently contrary to Indian interests. But India should resist the conversion of BRICS into a China-led geopolitical pole. India’s strategy should therefore be neither obstructionist nor acquiescent. It should seek to shape the agenda through coalitions within BRICS—working with Brazil, South Africa, the Gulf members, Indonesia, Egypt, and other countries on specific issues.
The aim should be to ensure that a stronger BRICS does not become synonymous with a more China-centric BRICS. India’s support for China’s 2027 presidency, reciprocated by Beijing’s backing for New Delhi’s 2026 summit, signals a willingness to work within the rotating chairmanship model while guarding against any single country defining the grouping’s strategic identity.
Strategic Implications for India
The above assessment of the BRICS Summit suggests six broad implications for Indian policy.
First, BRICS should be seen as a means, not an end in itself. India should judge BRICS by the practical options it creates, rather than by how closely it resembles a conventional alliance or economic bloc.
Second, India should maintain a diversified institutional portfolio. It should continue to use BRICS alongside the G20, Quad, SCO, bilateral partnerships, and Global South initiatives, rather than allowing any single platform to define its foreign policy.
Third, economics will increasingly determine geopolitical influence. India’s ability to shape BRICS will ultimately depend on its economic weight, manufacturing capability, technology, financial capacity, and connectivity. Indian influence in BRICS cannot be separated from India’s economic transformation.
Fourth, China remains the principal strategic variable. India should welcome a stronger Global South voice while ensuring that China does not become the uncontested economic and political centre of that voice.
Fifth, India should prioritise functionality over symbolism. Payment systems, supply chains, critical minerals, technology, energy, infrastructure, and development finance are more strategically valuable than grand declarations.
Sixth, India should favour an open and non-exclusive BRICS. New Delhi need not seek to “lead” BRICS in a hierarchical sense. Its more important role is to ensure that the grouping remains open, pragmatic, and sufficiently plural to accommodate diverse national interests.
Conclusion
The Delhi BRICS Summit represents a qualified yet strategically meaningful Indian success. India did not transform BRICS into a powerful alternative institution, nor did it resolve the grouping’s internal contradictions. Its financial mechanisms remain limited, its economic agenda remains difficult to implement, and China’s structural weight remains formidable.
But those limitations should not obscure the larger achievement. India helped preserve BRICS as a flexible diplomatic and economic platform rather than allowing it to become an anti-Western coalition or a China–Russia geopolitical bloc. The deeper significance of BRICS is not the creation of a “new world order,” but the expansion of strategic choice within an emerging multipolar order.
India’s preferred international system is one in which the United States, China, Russia, Europe, Japan, India and other regional powers coexist without any one of them acquiring a monopoly over global rules and institutions. BRICS is valuable because it can support this outcome without becoming a tightly integrated bloc. Its utility lies in enabling cooperation among major powers while expanding the agency of the Global South.
The central challenge is the Chinese presidency in 2027. India should neither attempt to contain China within BRICS nor allow Beijing to define the organisation’s strategic identity. It should work to ensure that BRICS remains an instrument of multipolar pluralism rather than Chinese primacy.
The Delhi Summit can therefore be distilled into three propositions:
- BRICS is not an alternative world order; it is a platform for shaping the emerging order.
- India’s objective should not be bloc leadership; it is to preserve strategic choice across multiple partnerships.
- The 2027 challenge is not to prevent China from leading BRICS but to prevent BRICS from becoming China-centric.
Seen in the above sense, the New Delhi Summit offers perhaps the most useful way to understand BRICS 2026 from an Indian strategic perspective: as a flexible instrument for expanding agency in a fragmenting world, rather than as a blueprint for a new bipolar or unipolar order.