With its just-concluded summit, BRICS has reached a point where its greatest challenge is no longer relevance but usefulness. Its expansion has added to its demographic and economic weight, but size alone does not confer clout. The question after the New Delhi Summit is whether this increasingly diverse grouping can turn that weight into practical cooperation in a more contested, fragmented and transactional world.
The 18th BRICS Summit, held in New Delhi on 12-13 September, offers grounds for optimism. India shepherded a substantive outcome across an expanded membership of eleven members and ten partner countries. The 45-page New Delhi Declaration was unanimously adopted, but unanimity should not be the principal measure of success. Previous BRICS Summits too have produced declarations, often by watering down or removing contentious formulations to preserve unity. What matters more is what BRICS actually delivers.
BRICS was not designed as an alliance, still less as a coalition against the West. Its members have divergent political systems, interests and foreign-policy orientations, and maintain very different relationships with the US and Europe. Its usefulness lies precisely in the fact that countries that do not share a common worldview can nevertheless cooperate where their interests converge.
India’s BRICS chairmanship has sought to push it from a platform principally expressing positions towards one building capabilities. That is more realistic than trying to turn BRICS into a cohesive bloc and consistent with India’s own approach of widening choices, not replacing one alignment with another.
The Summit marked twenty years of BRICS. Since its founding meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on 20 September 2006, BRICS has grown in importance and stature. I participated in that meeting, hosted over a luncheon by Brazil, and recall that Iran’s nuclear programme featured prominently in our discussions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had addressed the UNGA the previous day, asserting Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear activity and challenging the Security Council’s handling of the issue. Alongside West Asia, we discussed energy security, reform of the global financial architecture and the need for a more representative international order.
Two decades on, much of that agenda remains strikingly familiar. What has changed dramatically is the scale and institutional weight of BRICS. Its principal achievement is not any individual declaration but institutionalisation, most notably through the New Development Bank, and expanding cooperation in finance, health, technology, agriculture, trade and people-to-people exchanges.
The challenge now is qualitatively different. The question before BRICS today is whether its institutions can keep pace with its political and economic expansion, which presents its own dilemma. The larger BRICS becomes, the greater the range of interests it must accommodate. Trying to convert that diversity into a single political line would reduce the grouping to the lowest common denominator. A better model is disciplined, variable cooperation: members should be able to pursue practical projects where interests converge without requiring agreement on every geopolitical issue.
India’s chairmanship promoted precisely this approach. More than 400 meetings, 22 ministerials and 10 agency-level meetings were held across 30 cities, involving government, states, industry, academia and civil society. The Jaipur Consensus on MSME internationalisation, Bengaluru Declaration on standards, Guwahati Declaration against illicit drugs, Climate Adaptation Principles, Startup Innovation Fund and Energy Storage Guiding Principles give India’s chairmanship a worthy outcome beyond mere declaratory legacy.
Three aspects of the New Delhi Declaration stand out. First, it strongly condemns the 22 April 2025 terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir, including the cross-border movement of terrorists. The significance lies not simply in the words themselves but in all eleven members rallying around politically specific language on an issue of direct importance to India.
Second is the handling of conflicts on which BRICS members hold sharply different positions. The Declaration avoids naming the Ukraine conflict. On Iran, it limits itself to expressing concern over attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full IAEA safeguards without identifying the parties responsible. It also reaffirms the two-state solution and Palestinian statehood. This is not necessarily diplomatic
evasion. In a grouping this diverse, avoiding forced consensus on divisive geopolitical questions allows members to make progress where cooperation is possible.
Third, it projects BRICS as non-Western without being anti-Western. The Declaration condemns unilateral coercive measures, including secondary sanctions and non-UN Security Council-authorised sanctions, and criticises the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism as punitive, discriminatory and protectionist. Yet it does so without explicitly identifying those imposing them. It also supports an expanded role for the New Development Bank and advances work on cross-border payments.
The distinction is important. India’s objective is not to construct an alternative camp but to widen choices. The language on payments is particularly revealing. The BRICS Payment Task Force continues its work, but the Declaration recognises that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. This is diversification, not a crusade to displace the dollar.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi placed India’s approach in the broader context of reforming global governance. The proposal for ten reforms, to be developed into a BRICS Reform Roadmap by the 2027 Summit in China, focuses on representation, responsiveness and rule-making. They include time-bound UN Security Council reform, a Seafarers Emergency Support Network, greater reflection of economic realities in international financial institutions and a BRICS Continuity and Implementation Mechanism.
The larger argument is that India is seeking reform, not replacement. Institutions created for an earlier distribution of power cannot retain legitimacy indefinitely if their representation no longer reflects today’s realities.
Themes of resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability have found concrete expression in an Integrated Early Warning System for infectious diseases, disaster-management data guidelines and a Logistics Supply Chain Cooperation Framework. These respond to vulnerabilities exposed by conflict, sanctions, trade restrictions and maritime disruption.
Technology and critical minerals present an even larger opportunity. India’s warning against the weaponisation of semiconductors, rare earths and lithium is a development argument. Access to technologies and resources essential for growth should not become the preserve of those able to turn economic interdependence into strategic leverage. The same logic applies to AI, geospatial technology, digital agriculture and digital public infrastructure.
Through such initiatives BRICS goes beyond political declarations. Interoperable payments, affordable digital technologies, common standards, resilient supply chains and development finance are forms of power, but not coercive power. They could also become BRICS public goods, capable of being adapted by the wider Global South.
This is where BRICS’s significance will be determined. Dismissing it as an anti-Western project or a talking shop misses the structural change underway. A grouping representing such a large share of humanity and global output will inevitably influence the international system if it develops institutions, standards, financial mechanisms and technologies that others find useful.
Setting aside the bilaterals, which have already received considerable attention, one Summit-side development merits mention. Amid West Asian tensions and Strait of Hormuz disruption, the UAE and Iran held direct presidential-level talks on the Summit sidelines.
As BRICS chair for 2027 China will naturally seek to advance its priorities, including technology, industrial and supply-chain cooperation, artificial intelligence and a larger international role for “Greater BRICS”. The challenge is to see that BRICS remains a forum of diverse sovereign states, capable of practical cooperation without requiring strategic uniformity. A China-centric BRICS would narrow India’s choices, as would an anti-Western BRICS.
The larger verdict on India’s chairmanship hinges on practical questions. Can the New Development Bank become a more consequential lender? Can cross-border payment mechanisms become genuinely usable and the Startup Innovation Fund attract real capital? Can the early-warning and logistics initiatives become operational, and the proposed networks in seafarer support, mental wellness and traditional medicine actually serve people? If these initiatives prosper under China’s chairmanship, India will have shown that it was not simply adding another layer of BRICS activity, but strengthening the organisation’s institutional capacities. That would be a more meaningful achievement than any formulation in the New Delhi Declaration.
BRICS’s value lies in whether countries with different interests can build enough practical cooperation to become less vulnerable to disruptions, less dependent on a single source of finance or technology, and better represented in institutions that shape their future. The objective should not be to replace one hierarchy with another, but to make a more plural international system work better for those who have had little say in writing its rules. If BRICS can turn its growing weight into usable capabilities and greater choice, its next twenty years could prove even more consequential than its first.