The High-Wire Act

How New Delhi is trying to anchor the new BRICS
There are summits where the difficult part is getting countries to agree. Then there are summits where the real achievement may simply be preventing disagreement from becoming paralysis.
The 18th BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi, on 12–13 September, belongs firmly to the second category.
The grouping India is hosting is no longer the relatively compact BRICS of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The expansion has brought Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia into the core grouping, giving BRICS considerably greater economic and political weight — but also a far more complicated internal chemistry. The enlarged bloc now brings together countries whose interests converge on some questions and collide sharply on others. 
That makes India's chairmanship less about producing grand declarations and more about keeping the table intact.
The question is not whether New Delhi can make eleven countries agree on everything. They plainly cannot. The more important question is whether India can persuade them to discover enough common ground to make BRICS a practical instrument of development and a credible voice for the Global South, without turning it into an anti-Western alliance.
That is the real high-wire act.
The shadows from Bishkek
The timing could hardly be more demanding.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, held on 31 August and 1 September, brought together many of the same major powers that will now sit around the BRICS table. The Bishkek Declaration dealt with terrorism, regional security, connectivity, development and the war involving Iran. Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the occasion to stress India's familiar preference for dialogue, diplomacy, security, connectivity and opportunity. 
But Bishkek also demonstrated the difficulty of translating a broad coalition into a common geopolitical position.
The lesson for New Delhi is important. Multilateral platforms do not necessarily become stronger merely because they become larger. At some point, diversity of interests can become a source of paralysis.
BRICS is now confronting precisely that test.
The war in West Asia has brought the problem into sharp focus. Iran and the UAE, both members of the expanded BRICS, have found themselves on opposite sides of a deeply damaging regional confrontation. The May BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi ended without a joint statement because members could not bridge their differences over the conflict. India instead issued a Chair’s Statement and an outcome document acknowledging that there were differing views among members. 
For India, that was not merely an embarrassing diplomatic episode. It was a warning about the limits of the enlarged BRICS.
If two members cannot agree on a major conflict directly affecting their own region, expecting consensus on every geopolitical question would be unrealistic.
The wiser strategy, therefore, may be to lower the temperature and raise the practical content.
From geopolitical theatre to economic purpose
This is where India's approach becomes particularly important.
BRICS was never created as a military alliance. Its original impulse was economic: to give major emerging economies greater weight in institutions and decisions that had traditionally reflected the preferences of the developed West.
Its expansion has inevitably given it a stronger geopolitical dimension. But that does not mean its usefulness must be measured by how loudly it challenges Washington or Brussels.
For India, that distinction is critical.
New Delhi has strategic partnerships with the United States and Europe while simultaneously maintaining deep relationships with Russia, expanding engagement with the Gulf and managing a difficult but unavoidable relationship with China.
An openly anti-Western BRICS would therefore work against India's own interests.
At the same time, a BRICS reduced to a talking shop would squander the opportunity created by its expansion.
The middle path is to make development, finance, technology, health, climate issues, food and energy security the connective tissue of the grouping.
That may sound less dramatic than declarations about a new world order. It may also prove far more consequential.
India's unusual advantage
India enters the summit with an advantage that few other members possess.
It can speak to Washington and Brussels without being seen as a Western proxy. It can engage Moscow without being absorbed into Russia's worldview. It can sit across the table from Beijing while simultaneously competing with China economically and strategically. It has deepening relationships with the Gulf and a growing voice among developing countries.
That does not make India a neutral actor. Nor should it.
It makes India potentially useful as a bridge.
The distinction matters.
A bridge does not belong to either bank. It connects them.
New Delhi's challenge is to use that position not merely for diplomatic visibility but for institutional outcomes.
India's experience with Digital Public Infrastructure offers one such opportunity. Systems such as Aadhaar, UPI and the broader India Stack have demonstrated that digital infrastructure can be deployed at enormous scale and relatively low cost. The question now is whether elements of this experience can be adapted responsibly by other developing economies rather than simply presented as an Indian success story.
The same logic applies to health, disaster resilience, financial inclusion and food security.
If BRICS can produce practical cooperation in these areas, its relevance will become harder to dismiss.
The China question
Yet there is one relationship that will inevitably cast a long shadow over the summit: India-China.
President Xi Jinping's presence in New Delhi is significant. It is his first visit to India since 2019, and it comes after years of military tensions and political distrust following the 2020 Galwan clash. 
The BRICS platform provides an unusual setting for the two leaders to engage.
But expectations need to be kept realistic.
A bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi cannot substitute for the painstaking military and diplomatic negotiations required to stabilise the Line of Actual Control. Nor should BRICS become a vehicle through which bilateral disputes are quietly buried under the language of multilateral solidarity.
India needs peace on the border because it needs strategic space elsewhere.
That is not weakness. It is statecraft.
The same principle applies to Russia. Prime Minister Modi met President Vladimir Putin on the margins of the Bishkek SCO summit, where the two leaders discussed bilateral cooperation as well as BRICS under India's chairmanship. Modi reiterated that dialogue and diplomacy remain the way forward on conflicts. 
That formulation captures much of India's diplomatic predicament.
New Delhi wants strategic autonomy, but autonomy does not mean isolation. It means retaining the freedom to maintain multiple relationships without allowing any one of them to determine India's choices.
The economics behind the politics
The most important discussions in New Delhi may therefore take place away from the television cameras.
The New Development Bank, created by BRICS in 2015, is one of the grouping's most tangible institutions. Its future relevance will depend on whether it can mobilise much larger pools of private capital for infrastructure and sustainable development.
That is already becoming a focus of India's BRICS chairmanship. In August, the NDB and India's Ministry of Finance held a seminar specifically on mobilising private capital in developing countries, with emphasis on de-risking investment and making projects more bankable. By June 2026, the NDB said it had approved 141 projects with cumulative approvals of about $44 billion. 
This is the kind of BRICS that India should encourage.
Not merely a forum that criticises the existing financial architecture, but one that creates credible alternatives.
Similarly, discussions around greater use of national currencies in cross-border transactions have a practical rationale. Developing economies want greater resilience against financial shocks and excessive dependence on a handful of international currencies. But there is a considerable distance between encouraging local-currency trade and creating a common BRICS currency or a closed financial system. The latter would be far more complicated and politically divisive.
The temptation to announce revolutionary alternatives should not be allowed to outrun economic reality.
AI could become another test
There is another emerging field where India's chairmanship could leave a lasting mark: artificial intelligence.
AI is rapidly becoming a question not merely of technology but of development, employment, national security and social power. The world is already divided between competing regulatory philosophies, technological capabilities and ideas about who should control the infrastructure of the AI age.
For developing countries, the central question is simpler: will AI become another technology gap, with a handful of countries controlling the models, chips, data and computing infrastructure, or can it become a genuine development multiplier?
India has an opportunity to make the BRICS conversation about access as much as regulation — about affordable computing, skills, public-interest applications, responsible deployment and equitable access to AI.
That would fit naturally with India's larger Digital Public Infrastructure argument.
It would also give BRICS something more valuable than another geopolitical slogan: a constructive agenda for the future.
The real measure of success
The New Delhi Declaration will inevitably contain carefully negotiated language on Ukraine, West Asia and the wider transformation of the international order. Given the differences among members, some formulations may be deliberately cautious.
That should not necessarily be read as failure.
Diplomacy is sometimes about what is said. At other times, it is about what a diverse group manages not to break.
The real test will be whether India can convert the enlarged BRICS from a collection of competing national agendas into a platform capable of delivering a few concrete outcomes — stronger development finance, greater resilience in trade and supply chains, practical technology cooperation, energy security and a more representative voice for developing countries.
That would be a substantial achievement.
India does not need to make BRICS choose between the West and the rest.
It needs to demonstrate that the Global South can acquire greater agency without becoming another ideological camp.
That is a much harder proposition.
And perhaps that is why the New Delhi summit matters.
The old BRICS could afford to define itself by what it opposed. The new BRICS is too large, too diverse and too economically interconnected with the rest of the world for that luxury.
India's high-wire act, therefore, is not simply to balance China against America, or Russia against the West.
It is to hold together a coalition whose members increasingly disagree about the world — while persuading them that they can still cooperate on building it.
If New Delhi can manage that, India's greatest achievement may not be a dramatic declaration. It may be something quieter: proving that strategic autonomy can produce bridges where geopolitics keeps trying to build walls.
<><><>
(Author: kgsharma1@gmail.com; The writer is a retired officer of the Indian Information Service and a freelance writer. Also worked as an international media consultant with UNICEF Nigeria and contributes regularly to various publications.)