BRICS ticks the right boxes

INDIA has every reason to be satisfied with the outcome of the BRICS 2026 summit in both form and content. At a time when diatribe has replaced dialogue in many international fora, India convened an 11-member grouping with sharply divergent political positions, sustained a dialogue and secured consensus on a comprehensive New Delhi Declaration — a 140-paragraph, roughly 45-page text. That is significant.

The Ministry of External Affairs deserves credit for enabling closure this time after the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in May ended without a joint statement. The most delicate semantic task was to bridge the gulf between Iran and the UAE over the war in West Asia without naming any country. Tehran wanted an explicit reference to a “unilateral attack on Iran” as a violation of the UN Charter; the UAE wanted Iranian attacks on its sovereignty recognised.

The modus vivendi was to express “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in the Middle East” and make a call to exercise “maximum restraint” and avoid “actions that could further aggravate the situation.” There was also a line that acknowledged Iran’s position without naming the US: “serious concern over deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards.”

Seeking textual consensus also led to extreme caution. “Hormuz” does not appear in the declaration at all, even as Brent crude crossed $100 in the days before the summit on the back of the chokepoint crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.

Content is where India has a stronger cause for satisfaction. The Delhi Declaration strongly condemns terrorism in all forms and calls for “zero tolerance.” It specifically denounces the April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack; addresses the movement of terrorists, terror financing and safe havens; reaffirms that terrorism cannot be associated with any religion; and calls for accountability of those involved and their sponsors.

In a grouping that includes China, which has often blocked comparable language at the UN, this is not boilerplate — though similar wording had appeared in the 2025 Rio Declaration. Recalling the text with President Xi Jinping in Delhi matters.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi pressed for UN Security Council reform and changes in the voting power, leadership and priorities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reflect economic realities. The declaration backs comprehensive UN reform and greater representation for India and Brazil, and it carries the Indian formulation that the Global South must move from a rule-taker to a rule-maker.

Modi also proposed a continuity and implementation mechanism, including a troika, to follow up outcomes in a grouping that has no permanent secretariat. That is a practical institutional push, even if the “10-point Reform Roadmap” was not adopted as a formal deliverable for China’s 2027 chairmanship.

Regarding energy and trade, amid a war that has disrupted supply chains, the declaration has acknowledged that fossil fuels will still play an important role for developing economies and opposed unilateral, punitive measures of the CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) type. It voices serious concern over unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures that distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules — wording aimed at US tariffs and sanctions on Iran and Russia, without turning the document into an anti-Western manifesto.

Apropos of finance, there was no BRICS currency bravado. Finance ministers discussed efficient cross-border payments and local currencies, while tacitly recognising that a unified system needs a deeper trust framework than the present bilateral discord among some members.

Empirically, BRICS trade has expanded dramatically through business practices and customs improvements rather than emotive de-dollarisation ultimatums.

Since its inception two decades ago, the efficacy and credibility of BRICS have been determined by the India-China bilateral. That remains the abiding dialectical challenge. Both want to speak for the Global South and be seen as its trusted sherpa; each is wary of the other eroding its primacy and credibility.

For India, this is not an abstraction. China continues to pose a security challenge. Galwan 2020 was the most recent big shock, and strategic cooperation between China and Pakistan has compounded it. Operation Sindoor was illustrative in this regard.

At the politico-diplomatic level, Beijing does not accord Delhi peer status even as it seeks co-equivalence with Washington, though its comprehensive national power remains lower than that of the US.

The paradox is familiar: China strives for bipolarity with Washington globally while seeking unipolarity in Asia and denying parity to India and Japan.

That is the geopolitical problem India navigates inside BRICS. It must be a credible member of a grouping in which China is the largest economy, even while contesting Beijing’s denial of parity in Asia.

The Modi-Xi bilateral on the sidelines captured that dialectic. It was President Xi’s first visit to India in seven years and the first meeting between the two leaders on Indian soil after the Galwan clash.

Both stressed a strategic and long-term view of relations and committed to seeking a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution to the boundary question, proceeding from the political perspective of overall bilateral relations and the interests of the people of both nations.

In practical terms, this was a reaffirmation of restraint: differences after the Galwan incident would continue to be handled by existing military and diplomatic mechanisms. No new disengagement was announced, and no new friction point was manufactured despite recent tactical growling. The signal is a stable Line of Actual Control. The reality, established since 2020 and not altered this week, is that India still operates a more constrained patrolling pattern than before the Galwan clash.

Inclusive and equitable growth is a cherished BRICS objective, and tariff wars have created new challenges. Delhi needs robust trade arrangements with major economies, including the US, the EU and China.

The security and strategic dissonance with Beijing is the harder policy problem, and Delhi is managing it from relative economic asymmetry. The trade deficit with China is $116 billion, with high dependence on Chinese supplies of pharmaceutical ingredients, rare-earth magnets and solar-chain inputs. Sustained investment and diversification remain perennial Indian challenges.

The Xi-Modi meeting in Tianjin last year had already begun a bilateral thaw, in part because US tariff pressure pushed Delhi and Beijing toward hedging. The Delhi meeting consolidated that thaw; it did not dissolve the asymmetry.

So, the summit outcome is satisfying for India because it produced a comprehensive statement that condemned the Pahalgam attack, protected fossil-fuel policy space for developing economies, criticised unilateral trade measures without naming Washington and kept BRICS closer to a platform of partnership than a forum of protest. On the bilateral front, Delhi and Beijing found the wording to keep the grouping intact.

The 20-year-old BRICS has survived because India and China have a working template to disagree without derailing the forum. The credibility of this grouping will continue to be a function of whether Beijing is willing to concede to Delhi what it demands from Washington: peer respect and equitable accommodation of interests.

C Uday Bhaskar is Director, Society for Policy Studies