Can India Give BRICS a New Purpose? Part II: What Can Bring Them Together

If geopolitics is the fault line running through BRICS, what can hold it together? The answer may lie not in trying to resolve the world's political differences, but in finding areas where countries with very different interests can still work together. This is where India's opportunity begins.

What Can Bring Them Together

There is, however, something that can unite them: development.

Food security can unite them. Energy security can unite them. Affordable development finance can unite them. Resilient supply chains can unite them. Digital public infrastructure can unite them. Climate adaptation can unite them. Better access for MSMEs to finance and international markets can unite them. Cooperation in health, agriculture, science, education and disaster management can unite them.

These are not small subjects. They are the issues that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

India's theme for its 2026 presidency—resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability—is therefore particularly appropriate. The agenda already includes food and energy security, health, disaster resilience and critical supply chains. The challenge is to ensure that these remain the substance of BRICS rather than becoming the decorative background to geopolitical posturing.

Climate deserves particular attention. It has perhaps been crowded out by wars, tariffs, energy insecurity and strategic rivalry. That is unfortunate. For the developing world, climate change is not a fashionable Western preoccupation. It is a developmental reality. The countries of the Global South need technology, finance and adaptation more urgently than they need climate rhetoric.

BRICS could make a real contribution here—not by negotiating another grand political statement on climate change, but by identifying practical areas of cooperation: renewable energy technologies, resilient agriculture, water management, disaster prediction, green finance, energy storage and affordable technologies for adaptation.

The same principle could transform trade within BRICS. The objective should not be a grandiose common market or an unrealistic common currency. It should be something much more practical: lower transaction costs, interoperable digital payments, easier trade documentation, greater trade in services, improved trade finance and more diversified supply chains.

India has already begun moving in this direction. The BRICS trade ministers have endorsed principles aimed at expanding trade, strengthening value chains and improving access to finance for MSMEs. India's experience with UPI and digital public infrastructure gives it an opportunity to offer something concrete rather than merely another proposal for institutional reform.

The India Difference

This is where India's leadership can be different.

India need not attempt to make BRICS a rival to the G7. It need not make it an ideological successor to the Non-Aligned Movement. Nor should it allow the grouping to become an instrument of any one country's geopolitical ambitions.

It can instead attempt something more difficult and perhaps more valuable: to make BRICS useful.

The Delhi Test

The test of the Delhi summit will therefore not be the number of leaders who attend, the grandeur of the ceremonies or even the length of the final declaration. The real test will be whether countries with such divergent political interests can agree on a limited number of practical programmes and then implement them.

A consensus document may indeed be difficult in the present circumstances. There are too many wars, too many disagreements and too many competing national interests. Yet consensus is not impossible if the agenda is carefully drawn.

India's diplomatic skill will lie in knowing what not to put into the document.

There will inevitably be pressure to address the great geopolitical conflicts of the day. Some reference to them may be unavoidable. But BRICS should resist the temptation to become another forum for rehearsing the world's divisions. Its strength lies precisely in the fact that countries which disagree profoundly on politics can still cooperate on matters of common interest.

That could be the real genius of India's presidency.

In an international system increasingly defined by confrontation, India could demonstrate that cooperation does not require agreement on everything. Countries can remain competitors in one arena and partners in another. They can disagree on borders, security and ideology while cooperating on food, energy, health, technology, trade and climate.

That may sound modest. It is not.

The world today has no shortage of geopolitical forums. What it lacks are institutions capable of delivering practical cooperation across geopolitical divides.

BRICS has the scale to become such an institution. India has the credibility to try to make it one.

The question, then, is not what India has gained from BRICS so far. It is what India can help BRICS become.

If Delhi succeeds in shifting the conversation from who is against whom to what can we do together, the summit will have achieved something more enduring than diplomatic theatre. It may give BRICS a purpose—and India a leadership role—that is both larger and more useful than simply becoming another pole in a divided world.

(Uday Kumar Varma is an IAS officer. Retired as Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting)