In BRICS, India’s quiet triumph in how it passed the test of cohesion

In what can be seen as a diplomatic success for both the grouping and its host, the consensus reached at the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi brought to the fore the continuing relevance of the multilateral forum in an international system grappling with competing power interests and geopolitical conflicts. The New Delhi Declaration was significant because, despite divergent viewpoints, those differences could be accommodated within a common framework of cooperation. 

For an enlarged grouping with increasingly diverse political, economic and strategic interests, reaching a consensual declaration was itself an indication that BRICS can retain a measure of cohesion without requiring its members to take identical positions on the major questions before the world. For India, which held the chair, it was also a test of its ability to navigate those differences and keep the grouping focused on areas of common interest.

The difficulty of achieving this outcome becomes clearer when one looks back at BRICS’s evolution. Moving from a five-country grouping, it has expanded into a much more heterogeneous association of major emerging economies, energy powers and regional actors. The 2024 expansion brought Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the fold, followed by Indonesia in 2025. Its aggregate economic and demographic weight has consequently grown substantially, but so has the range of interests that have to be reconciled. Consensus among five countries is difficult enough. Consensus among 11 countries with sharply different regional priorities is another proposition altogether.

The Delhi summit, thus, provided a useful test of whether expansion had diluted BRICS’s capacity to function as a coherent forum. The answer, at least for now, is no. But the nature of that coherence matters. 

The toughest test came from West Asia

BRICS does not derive its significance from behaving like a military alliance or a tightly integrated political bloc. Its value lies in bringing together countries that may disagree on particular conflicts, have different relationships with the West and even have serious disputes with one another, while still finding areas in which their collective weight can be brought to bear.

The toughest test came from West Asia. Iran and the UAE were participating in the same summit despite being on opposite sides of a conflict that had directly affected the Gulf. Saudi Arabia’s position also had to be accommodated, while Russia’s own confrontation with the West added another layer of complexity. The language on the conflict therefore became one of the principal obstacles to agreement. Negotiations continued for several days before a formulation acceptable to all emerged. The final declaration called for maximum restraint, opposed actions that could further escalate the conflict, and stressed dialogue and diplomacy.

The formulation was cautious. It did not attempt to impose a single interpretation of responsibility for the conflict, because doing so could have fractured the consensus. Yet that caution should not simply be dismissed as diplomatic evasion. In a grouping where members have genuinely conflicting interests, finding language that everyone can accept is itself a form of multilateral effectiveness.

The Iran-UAE episode illustrates this point of patient, tightrope-walking multilateral diplomacy. Nearly 100 hours of negotiations, at different levels and involving several member countries, went into resolving these differences. China and Russia also helped move the parties towards an acceptable compromise. The eventual declaration was therefore not merely the product of leaders arriving in Delhi and agreeing to a text. It reflected a year of diplomatic engagement under India’s chairmanship.

In some ways, the same process was visible in the handling of Ukraine. 

Another issue contained

The declaration did not allow the Russia-Ukraine war to become a central point of collective disagreement. Instead, it stayed with the broader principles of dialogue, consultation and diplomacy. For Russia, this avoided language it could not accept. For countries that did not share Moscow’s position, it avoided forcing them into an explicit endorsement of it. The issue was contained rather than allowed to dominate the summit.

This is an important feature of BRICS. Its members cannot be expected to share a common position on every major international crisis. Russia’s interests are not India’s; India’s are not China’s; Iran’s are not those of the UAE or Saudi Arabia. Several BRICS countries maintain important economic and strategic relationships with the United States and Europe even while criticising aspects of the Western-dominated international order.

The future of the grouping therefore does not depend on eliminating these contradictions. It depends on finding a way of working through them. That is also why the description of BRICS as an emerging anti-Western alliance is too simple. There is certainly a strong element of resistance to unilateralism in the grouping’s politics. Its members have repeatedly called for reform of the United Nations and international financial institutions, criticised unilateral sanctions and protectionist trade measures, and demanded greater representation for developing countries in global decision-making. But that is different from constructing a closed geopolitical bloc against the West.

India, in particular, has little interest in such a transformation. Its foreign policy has increasingly rested on maintaining strategic options rather than joining one rigid camp. A BRICS that became an explicitly anti-American alliance could narrow India's room for manoeuvre. A BRICS that gives India and other emerging economies greater collective leverage within a more plural international system is far more useful. The New Delhi Declaration reflects this more pragmatic conception of the grouping.

Realistic rather than revolutionary

The summit’s economic agenda did not announce a dramatic rupture with the existing international financial system. Instead, it concentrated on making trade and investment among BRICS members easier through greater use of national currencies and more efficient cross-border payment mechanisms. The New Development Bank was encouraged to expand local-currency financing. Work on payment-system interoperability was advanced. There was no immediate move towards the much-discussed common BRICS currency, which would have been politically striking but economically and institutionally considerably more difficult.

This form of financial diversification is realistic rather than revolutionary. Reducing dependence on a particular currency or payment infrastructure does not necessarily mean trying to destroy it. It means creating alternatives and reducing vulnerability to the use of financial systems as instruments of geopolitical pressure.

The same pragmatism was evident in the summit’s wider economic and developmental agenda. Artificial intelligence governance, digital public infrastructure, health cooperation, industrial capabilities, agriculture, startups, MSMEs, skills, development finance and sustainable development occupied substantial space alongside the major geopolitical questions. India’s chairmanship had already generated more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements across the country during the year, producing initiatives across the three established BRICS pillars of political and security cooperation, economic and financial cooperation, and cultural and people-to-people exchanges.

These less dramatic areas may ultimately determine whether the enlarged BRICS becomes more than a summit-level political forum. A declaration can articulate dissatisfaction with the existing international order, but in the longer run, institutions and practical mechanisms slowly alter the balance within it. This is particularly relevant to the grouping’s pitch for mirroring the interests of the Global South.

Numbers alone don’t create political influence

Going by the numbers, it would be stating the obvious to say that BRICS members represent an enormous share of the world’s population and a substantial part of global economic output. But numerical weight alone does not create political influence. Influence requires the ability to turn aggregate weight into common positions, institutions and negotiating leverage. In its own way, the New Delhi summit made some progress in that direction.

The declaration called for greater representation of developing countries in global governance and reaffirmed support for a more inclusive and equitable multilateral system. It also addressed issues ranging from development finance and climate change to food security, technology and artificial intelligence. The political language was often deliberately broad, but that breadth allowed countries with different national priorities to see their concerns reflected in a common framework.

The Indian imprint on the deliberations could be seen in the declaration’s strong condemnation of the Pahalgam terrorist attack; its references to terrorism financing, safe havens and the need to combat terrorism without double standards were important for New Delhi. China’s signing of a consensus document containing such language was diplomatically significant for India, given the wider regional context. The declaration also called for progress towards a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, an Indian priority at the United Nations for decades. This was one of several instances in which India managed to advance its interests without making the BRICS document appear to be an Indian document.

That is an important distinction in assessing the chairmanship. Successful chairmanship of a consensus-based grouping is not about getting every member to endorse the chair’s agenda wholesale. It is about identifying where national interests overlap, where they can be reconciled and where differences need to be contained rather than resolved. By this measure, India’s performance was particularly notable because it had to manage several relationships simultaneously.

The limits to the outcome

It had to work with Russia without turning BRICS into a vehicle for Moscow’s geopolitical agenda. It had to engage China despite the unresolved strategic rivalry between the two countries. It had to accommodate Iran while maintaining important relationships with Israel, the United States and the Gulf monarchies. It had to bring Saudi Arabia and the UAE into formulations acceptable to Iran. And it had to pursue a Global South agenda without allowing BRICS to become defined solely by opposition to Western power.

The West Asia negotiations provide the clearest example. A strongly worded declaration assigning responsibility might have sounded more decisive, but it would probably have been harder to achieve. The inclusive language allowed the grouping to say something collectively at precisely the moment when saying too much could have prevented it from saying anything at all.

On the question of the Ukraine conflict, the summit did not have the ambition to reach common ground. But it tried to ensure that the conflict did not obstruct the larger functioning of the organisation. A multilateral grouping can, therefore, make progress without resolving every disagreement brought into the room. Sometimes its usefulness lies in preventing those disagreements from making cooperation elsewhere impossible.

At the same time, there are clear limits to what the Delhi outcome demonstrates. These limitations are not hard to find. The New Delhi Declaration is a substantial document, but a declaration is not a roadmap. Many of its economic and institutional ambitions will depend on whether members are willing to invest political and financial capital in implementing them. Local-currency trade will require deeper financial infrastructure. Alternative payment systems will have to overcome technical and regulatory barriers. Greater intra-BRICS trade will require reductions in tariffs and other obstacles. Institutional reform at the UN, IMF and World Bank will require negotiations far beyond BRICS itself.

Beyond this, there is also the looming question of China’s growing weight within the grouping. An enlarged BRICS creates opportunities for collective autonomy, but it can also increase the relative influence of its largest economic and political power. India, therefore, has to ensure that BRICS remains a genuinely plural forum rather than becoming an instrument through which one major power defines the agenda for everyone else. In some ways, that also explains why India would prefer a flexible, consensus-based approach to BRICS’s functioning.

From New Delhi’s point of view, BRICS is useful only as long as it provides elbow room for strategic autonomy rather than another alliance structure to which India becomes tied. The Delhi summit, therefore, deserves neither exaggerated triumphalism nor easy cynicism. BRICS has not emerged as a unified alternative to the Western order. It has not resolved the contradictions between its members, nor has it worked out a common trade and security policy, nor forged a unified response to the major wars of the day. But those are not the only measures of its potential. Even with these limits, it can still function as a counterweight and a site of some convergence.

Its more important achievement is that an increasingly diverse group of major emerging economies remains capable of collective deliberation at a time when international politics is becoming more fragmented and less predictable. It can articulate common concerns about representation, sanctions, trade, development and global governance while allowing its members to retain very different positions on particular conflicts. That makes BRICS less a conventional bloc than an evolving instrument of multipolar diplomacy.

This underscores how India’s chairmanship had its most significant moments. The Delhi summit was seen as a success because India helped create enough diplomatic space for differences to coexist with an agreement. The year-long chairmanship built networks of engagement across sectors; the negotiations kept channels open when consensus appeared difficult; and the final declaration brought together political language and practical cooperation without forcing the grouping into an ideological mould.

For BRICS, this reflects a degree of institutional maturity: it is not an ideological bloc, a military alliance or a rigid anti-Western front, but a grouping with its own set of common interests to pursue and common ground to reach. For India, managing it successfully was the more immediate diplomatic test. The Delhi summit suggests that, at least on this occasion, New Delhi understood the distinction between making a declaration and building consensus, and managed to do both, bringing a convergent frame for some divergent views.

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