BRICS was born as a bet, not a bloc. In 2001 a Goldman Sachs economist named Jim O'Neill grouped Brazil, Russia, India and China into a single acronym to make an argument to investors: these four large, fast-growing economies would, over the coming decades, reshape the distribution of global output and portfolios ought to be positioned accordingly. It was an argument about asset allocation. It carried no political content whatsoever and it is one of the stranger facts of contemporary diplomacy that the four countries later decided to hold its author's abbreviation to its word.
The transformation from an investment argument to a diplomatic grouping happened in stages and each stage was propelled less by shared conviction than by shared frustration. The first BRIC summit convened in 2009, in the wreckage of a financial crisis that had originated in American mortgage markets and then been exported, through the plumbing of a dollar-centred financial system, to the balance sheets of the entire world. The lesson the emerging economies drew was not subtle. They had grown large enough to be devastated by decisions made in Washington and New York, yet they held nowhere near a proportionate voice in the institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank) that governed the aftermath. South Africa joined in 2010, converting an acronym into an unpronounceable but serviceable word. What had begun as a description of where growth was going became a demand about where power ought to follow.
If the 2008 crisis supplied the dissatisfaction, the years that followed supplied the urgency. The weaponisation of the dollar through sanctions, accelerating after 2014 and reaching a new intensity with the freezing of Russian reserves in 2022, taught every capital outside the Western core a discomfiting lesson about dependency. The pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains that had been optimised for efficiency and never for resilience. Great-power competition returned in earnest and with it the recognition that economics and security had never really been separate domains: that a semiconductor, a rare-earth deposit, a payment rail and a shipping lane were now instruments of statecraft as surely as any warship. By the time India took up the 2026 chairship, BRICS had drifted far from its founding remit. Its agenda now ran to artificial intelligence and critical minerals, cross-border payments and pandemic preparedness, grain exchanges and submarine cables. The economic acronym had become, if not an instrument for restructuring global power, then at least a forum in which the possibility of such restructuring could be discussed without Western supervision.
That origin still shapes the thing it became. BRICS carries in its founding DNA the assumption that economic weight ought to translate into political voice and the corollary frustration that, for its members, it has not translated nearly fast enough. This is the engine that drives the group forward. It is also, as we shall see, the source of its most persistent illusions.
What India Wanted
Every BRICS presidency is, in part, an argument about what BRICS should be, conducted through the medium of an agenda. India framed its 2026 chairship around four words: resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability and the temptation is to dismiss these as the interchangeable words of every summit communiqué. That would be a mistake. Read carefully, the four pillars amount to a fairly precise theory of the organisation and the theory is worth reconstructing because it tells us what New Delhi was actually trying to do.
Resilience, in India's usage, was the language of vulnerability made strategic: supply chains that could survive a shock, food systems that could withstand a fertiliser crisis, energy flows that could not be severed by a single sanction, health infrastructure that could meet the next pandemic. This is the preoccupation of a state that has been on the receiving end of disruption and has concluded that autonomy is less about grand alignment than about the mundane capacity to keep functioning when the global system seizes up. Innovation pointed toward a different anxiety and a different ambition: artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, quantum research, the machinery of what India increasingly calls technological sovereignty. Here the message was that the Global South could not remain a permanent consumer of technologies designed elsewhere and governed by others' rules. Cooperation, the blandest of the four on its surface, was in practice the most revealing: it named consensus-building itself as a value, South-South coordination as a method and the patient work of keeping a fractious group talking as an end worth pursuing. Sustainability, finally, carried the whole weight of the argument between growth and responsibility that falls hardest on countries still trying to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty while the atmosphere fills with carbon they did not emit.
What unites these pillars is what they conspicuously omit. There is no pillar called confrontation, none called alignment, none that gestures toward a common foreign policy or a shared adversary. India's conception of BRICS, as expressed through its agenda, is functional rather than ideological: a workshop for practical problems rather than a barracks for a coming struggle. This supports a reading that circulated widely in the run-up to the summit: that India was interested in consolidating BRICS and making it work, not in transforming it into an explicitly anti-Western bloc.
The reading is largely correct, but it should not be accepted without examination, because "consolidation" can conceal genuine ambition as easily as it can substitute for it. India convened more than four hundred meetings across some thirty cities during its chairship year, not the theatre of a single leaders' photograph but the unglamorous accretion of working groups, ministerial tracks, expert panels and technical committees. The wager embedded in all this activity is that institutionalisation is itself a form of power. A grouping that meets only once a year at the level of presidents is a gesture. A grouping with permanent machinery, standing task forces and a repository of accumulated agreements is something that begins to shape behaviour whether or not its members agree on ultimate ends. When Modi told the summit that BRICS had reached a "coming of age" and urged the Global South to become a "rule-shaper" rather than a rule-taker, the phrase captured the ambition precisely. India did not want to overthrow the rules. It wanted a hand on the pen. Consolidation, in this light, was not the absence of transformation but a particular theory of how transformation actually happens, slowly, institutionally and without the drama that would frighten off half the members.
The Grammar of the Declaration
To understand what BRICS can and cannot do, there is no better text than the declaration it produced, provided one reads it the way a diplomat reads it rather than the way a headline treats it. The New Delhi Declaration is an enormous document, sprawling across health and space and taxation and forests and the conservation of big cats and its very comprehensiveness is the first thing worth noticing. A group confident of its power does not need to say everything; a group still assembling its identity from the overlapping interests of eleven members catalogues everything, because the catalogue is how each member finds its own priorities reflected back.
The more instructive reading looks at the words used to express commitment. The declaration relies on cautious words. Its members "welcome", "note", "acknowledge", "encourage" and
"take note of" far more often than they resolve, establish or bind. Its most consequential passages are hedged with a recurring set of qualifiers: "on a voluntary basis", "member-driven", "according to national circumstances", "respecting national priorities", "there is no one-size-fits-all approach". This is not a failure of drafting. It is the exact linguistic signature of consensus among states that agree on the diagnosis and disagree on the cure. Where the declaration is most concrete, it tends to describe process rather than outcome: a task force convened, a study group established, terms of reference refined, a feasibility study commissioned. These words describe an organisation that grows gradually because it cannot act by command.
Consider the paragraph on reform of the United Nations Security Council, one of the most carefully engineered sentences in the entire text. The declaration reaffirms support for a more representative Council and, in a much-noticed passage, records that China and Russia "reiterate their support to the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role" in the UN, including its Security Council. At first glance this sounds like a clear endorsement, but in reality this settles nothing. Support for an "aspiration to play a greater role" is conspicuously not support for a permanent seat and the sentence pointedly omits any Chinese endorsement of India's actual membership. Two of the group's members are permanent members of the very body its other members wish to enter and they are in no hurry to dilute their own veto. The declaration does not paper over this contradiction so much as embalm it in language elegant enough to be signed by everyone and binding on no one.
The same technique governs the passage on trade. The declaration voices "serious concerns" about the rise of unilateral tariffs that distort trade and violate the rules of the World Trade Organization and warns that such measures disrupt supply chains and deepen the disparities that fall hardest on developing economies. It is, in substance, an indictment of the tariff politics that had by 2026 become the signature of American economic statecraft. But it never crosses the line into naming the United States, because several of the signatories (India most of all) were at that very moment negotiating or preserving crucial trade relationships with Washington. The declaration thus performs the central trick of the whole BRICS project: it expresses collective dissatisfaction with the existing order while scrupulously avoiding any collective act against the order's principal architect. It is the grammar of a counterweight, not a counter-bloc.
The Dollar Question, Without the Hype
No subject generates more heat and less light than the future of the dollar and the New Delhi Declaration offers an unusually clear opportunity to separate the two. For years, a certain kind of commentary has held that BRICS is on the verge of launching a common currency and dethroning the dollar as the world's reserve asset. The declaration, read honestly, extinguishes that expectation. Its treatment of the subject is buried in a paragraph on the BRICS Payment Task Force and the language could hardly be more cautious. The members acknowledge work on the "cross-border interoperability of payment and messaging channels" and discussions on settling trade in "BRICS local currencies," and then immediately qualify even this modest ambition with the now-familiar formula that national priorities must be respected and that there is "no one-size-fits-all approach." There is no BRICS currency. There is no timetable for one. There is not even a firm collective commitment to a shared payment system, only an encouragement to keep studying the possibility.
This restraint reflects reality and it reflects India's position in particular. New Delhi has been consistently wary of allowing BRICS to become a vehicle for aggressive de-dollarisation, for reasons both prudential and strategic: it has no wish to hand Washington a pretext for the very
tariffs Trump has threatened and it has no interest in a monetary project that would, in practice, be dominated by the renminbi. What India and several other members do want is something narrower and more defensible and the distinction between the two is the most important idea in this entire debate. De-dollarisation, in the maximalist sense, means replacing the dollar as the anchor of global finance. Financial diversification means reducing dependence on any single point of failure: settling more trade in local currencies where it makes sense, building payment rails that do not run through Western institutions, developing sources of development finance outside the Bretton Woods system and lowering the transaction costs and political risks of doing business. The first is a fantasy; the second is already happening at the margins, quietly and will continue regardless of what any summit declares.
The reasons replacing the dollar remains so difficult are structural and largely impervious to political will. The dollar's dominance rests on the unmatched depth and liquidity of American capital markets, on full convertibility, on a legal and institutional credibility built over decades and above all on the network effects that make a currency useful precisely because everyone else already uses it. No BRICS member offers a serious alternative. The renminbi remains subject to capital controls that make it unsuitable as a global reserve; the rupee is not freely convertible; the members share no monetary union, no common central bank, no aligned exchange-rate regimes and no appetite to surrender the sovereignty such integration would require. A grouping that cannot agree on a shared payment system is not about to agree on a shared currency. The realistic future is therefore not a post-dollar world but a somewhat less dollar-dependent one: a multi-currency system in which the dollar remains dominant but marginally less monopolistic, with more trade settled bilaterally, more reserves diversified and more of the world's financial plumbing routed around chokepoints that recent history has taught everyone to fear. That is a meaningful change. It is not the revolution the hype describes and BRICS has stopped pretending otherwise.
Counterweight, Not Counter-Bloc
The framing that refuses to die is "BRICS versus the West," and it is worth stating plainly why it is analytically useless. BRICS is not an alliance. It has no treaty of mutual defence, no unified command, no shared adversary that all members recognise as such and no mechanism for compelling any member to act against its own interests. To call it an anti-Western bloc is to mistake a diverse coalition with shared concerns for a coherent counter-hegemonic project and to ignore the actual foreign policies of the states involved.
The evidence is in the membership. India is a member of the Quad alongside the United States, Japan and Australia, conducts joint naval exercises with the American navy and had by early 2026 signed a trade agreement with Washington. The Gulf states within BRICS host American military bases and remain woven into Western security architecture even as they expand their ties to Beijing and Moscow. Brazil guards a diplomatic tradition of its own and has no wish to be conscripted into anyone's confrontation. Even the members most hostile to the West (Russia under sanctions, Iran under bombardment) cannot manufacture unity out of the others' ambivalence. Putin could stand at the New Delhi podium and denounce those who think in "colonial categories" and wield tariffs and sanctions as instruments of coercion and the sentiment would be widely shared in the room; but sentiment is not strategy and no communiqué translated it into collective action against the target everyone had in mind.
What BRICS offers its members instead is leverage within the existing system rather than an exit from it. It is a place to build alternative institutions (a development bank, a contingent reserve, a payment task force) that expand the options available to states tired of being at the
mercy of Western-controlled ones, without requiring anyone to renounce their Western relationships. It is a caucus in which the Global South can coordinate positions before walking into the rooms where global rules are actually set. It is, in the truest sense, a counterweight: something that shifts the balance of a negotiation without overturning the table. The distinction between counterweight and counter-bloc is not semantic. A counter-bloc seeks to replace the order and must therefore win. A counterweight seeks only to be heavy enough that the order cannot be arranged without consulting it and by that lower standard BRICS is already succeeding.
The Balancer
If BRICS is best understood as a counterweight, India is best understood as the swing weight within it: the member whose particular genius and particular vulnerability, is its refusal to belong wholly to anyone.
No other country sits simultaneously inside the Quad and BRICS, buys Russian oil and American weapons, courts Gulf capital and Western technology with equal energy and shares a disputed, militarised Himalayan frontier with the very member whose economic weight defines the group. New Delhi has a name for this posture: strategic autonomy, or in the newer words used by its diplomats, multi-alignment. Abroad it is often misread as indecision. It is better understood as a deliberate refusal to let any single relationship harden into a dependency. India learned the price of dependency the hard way. The collapse of the Soviet Union left an army equipped largely by Moscow scrambling for spare parts and for decades Western capitals treated India's strategic choices as problems to be managed rather than preferences to be respected. The conclusion New Delhi drew was not that it should choose more carefully. It was that it should avoid choosing at all, wherever choosing could be avoided.
Inside BRICS, this posture serves a purpose that is rarely spoken aloud at summits and the purpose is China. The gravest risk to India's interests within the group is not that BRICS becomes anti-Western but that it becomes Chinese. A grouping founded on the premise of plural voices could slowly reorganise itself around an economy larger, by most measures, than those of all its other members combined. The clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020, the first fatal confrontation on that frontier in forty-five years, turned a long-standing suspicion into settled doctrine. The patrolling agreement struck on the eve of the Kazan summit in 2024 and Modi's journey to Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation the following year, thawed the relationship without warming it. India sits beside China at every BRICS table precisely so that China does not sit at the head of it. Much of what looks like New Delhi's caution is better read as a structural hedge against Chinese pre-eminence than as timidity. That includes its insistence on consensus, its coolness toward a common currency that would in practice be a renminbi project and its preference for agreed criteria over rapid enlargement.
The same refusal to belong makes India useful to almost everyone. To Washington, an Indian seat inside BRICS is the surest guarantee that the group cannot harden into an alliance. To Moscow and Beijing, India's presence lends the enterprise a legitimacy that a Sino-Russian club could never claim on its own: the world's most populous country and its largest democracy, sitting willingly at the table. To the smaller states of the Global South, India offers something rarer still, a route to voice without a patron's leash. Its G20 presidency in 2023 ended with the African Union admitted as a permanent member and that gave the claim a credibility speeches alone could not have earned.
But balancing works only so long as nobody forces the choice and 2025 offered a sharp reminder that others can. When Washington doubled its tariffs on Indian goods to fifty per cent,
citing New Delhi's purchases of Russian oil among its reasons, the cost of autonomy was set not in New Delhi but in the White House. India absorbed the blow, refused to be lectured and then negotiated its way back to a trade agreement. That response showed both the resilience of the balancing act and its limits. A swing weight matters only while both sides of the scale believe it might move. If either Washington or Beijing concludes that India will never truly tilt against it, multi-alignment risks curdling into the worst of both worlds: taken for granted by everyone and trusted fully by no one.
Bigger, Not Yet Stronger
If India's balancing defines the group's character, enlargement defines its predicament. The invitation issued at Johannesburg in 2023 was meant to announce that BRICS had become a magnet and in one sense it did. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates took up their seats. Argentina, after a change of government, declined. Saudi Arabia has preferred to remain ambiguously half-inside and Indonesia joined at the start of 2025. A new tier of "partner countries," created at Kazan, opened an antechamber for states that wanted proximity without full commitment. The expanded group now speaks for close to half the world's population and something like two-fifths of its output measured at purchasing-power parity. On paper, it has never been weightier.
In practice, every new member brought its quarrels with it. Egypt and Ethiopia remain locked in a bitter dispute over the great dam on the Blue Nile. Iran and the UAE contest sovereignty over islands in the Gulf and Tehran's relations with the Gulf monarchies swing between détente and dread. Layered on top of the rivalry between India and China, these are not minor frictions. They are the reason the declaration reads the way it does. Each enlargement adds a veto point to a body that operates by consensus and each veto point pushes the common language closer to the lowest common denominator. Iran's membership tests this most starkly. A member at a war can expect its partners' sympathy, perhaps a carefully drafted paragraph of concern. It cannot expect the solidarity an alliance would owe, because BRICS is not one and several of its members have no intention of letting it become one on Tehran's account.
This is the trade-off at the heart of expansion. Every addition strengthens the group's claim to speak for the Global South and weakens its capacity to say anything specific on its behalf. India understood this earlier than most. It pressed for criteria over momentum and for the partner tier as a way to widen the circle without diluting the core. The waiting room was its preferred answer to the stampede. One of the quieter questions that will decide what BRICS looks like by its thirtieth anniversary is whether that room becomes a pathway to membership or a permanent annex.
Hedges, Not Replacements
The possibilities and limits of the BRICS project are clearest in the institutions it has actually built. The New Development Bank, agreed at Fortaleza in 2014 and headquartered in Shanghai, was designed as a quiet rebuke to Bretton Woods. Its founding members hold equal shares, so no single capital can dominate it the way Washington dominates the World Bank. Alongside it sits the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a hundred-billion-dollar pool meant to offer members an emergency lifeline that did not come stamped with IMF conditions.
Both institutions are real. Both have also run headlong into the very system they were built to hedge against. In March 2022, weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, the New Development Bank put new transactions with Russia on hold. It had little choice. The bank raises money on international capital markets, largely in dollars and depends on credit ratings issued by Western
agencies. Lending to a sanctioned founder would have jeopardised its ability to lend to anyone. There is no more eloquent testimony to the structural power of the dollar than a BRICS bank declining to do business with a BRICS founder. The reserve arrangement tells a similar story in a different key. A member can draw only a modest share of its entitlement freely; access to the rest requires an IMF programme to be in place. The alternative to the Fund, in other words, is tethered to the Fund.
None of this makes these institutions pointless. It makes them what they really are: hedges rather than replacements, built to widen the menu of options rather than abolish the old one. They grow by accretion. They add members beyond the original five, lend modestly but steadily in local currencies and slowly accumulate the track record that credibility requires. Here, too, India's distinctive contribution becomes clear. Its pitch is not a rival currency but rival plumbing: the open, interoperable model of digital public infrastructure that the Unified Payments Interface made famous at home. New Delhi now offers that model abroad as an alternative to systems controlled by any single power, Western or Chinese. If BRICS ever does build payment rails that route around chokepoints, they will probably look less like a grand monetary union and more like a set of linked national systems that agree to talk to each other. That is unglamorous. It is also the kind of thing that actually gets built.
Inclusive for Whom?
The concern about unequal representation is legitimate and it deserves to be stated plainly. The United States holds enough votes in the International Monetary Fund to veto its most important decisions. A modest reform of IMF voting shares, agreed in 2010, waited five years for ratification by the American Congress. By unwritten convention, an American leads the World Bank and a European leads the Fund. The World Trade Organization's Appellate Body, the highest court of global trade, has been unable to hear appeals since 2019 because Washington blocked new appointments. The Security Council's permanent membership still mirrors the victors of a war that ended eight decades ago. Anyone who claims the existing order is already inclusive has not been paying attention. BRICS gives organised voice to a frustration shared well beyond its membership.
But multipolarity is not the same thing as inclusion and the slippage between the two is the most persistent illusion in the BRICS story. A world of several great powers can be less fair than a world of one. If each pole carves out a sphere of influence, smaller states lose the universal rules they could once appeal to. Several BRICS members are not democracies and inclusion among governments is not the same as inclusion of peoples. The group also reproduces hierarchies of its own: the two permanent members who will not share their veto, the single economy that outweighs the rest, the creditor that sits across the table from its debtors. The last of these is especially awkward. BRICS speaks eloquently about debt distress in the developing world, yet China is the largest bilateral creditor to many of the countries in distress. The grinding restructurings of recent years, Zambia's and Sri Lanka's among them, were slowed in part by the difficulty of coordinating Beijing with everyone else at the table.
Indian foreign policy has an elegant formulation for this problem. S. Jaishankar, the architect of much of New Delhi's recent diplomacy, has argued for years that a multipolar world requires a multipolar Asia. The phrase is the key to India's entire posture. New Delhi does not want to trade an order dominated by one superpower for a continent dominated by another. It wants multipolarity all the way down. That, in the end, is the honest test of whether BRICS makes the world more inclusive. The test is not whether it weakens the West but whether its proposals strengthen the rules that protect the weak: functioning trade arbitration, fair and timely debt
restructuring, climate finance that actually arrives, a Security Council that represents the world as it is. Measured against that standard, BRICS's record so far is one of diagnosis more than delivery. The diagnosis is correct. The delivery is the work of the next decade.
Terms of Transition
The leaders of BRICS nations together capture the real nature of BRICS's power. It is neither the power to command nor the power to resist, but the power of the plausible alternative. Washington can no longer assume that the Global South will fall into line, because the Global South now has a room of its own in which to compare notes. A coalition that cannot agree on a currency, a common enemy or even the enlargement of the Security Council still raises the price of ignoring it. That is what a counterweight does.
What happens next depends less on summit rhetoric than on a handful of unglamorous tests: Whether the payment task force produces rails that actually carry trade, rather than further terms of reference. Whether the New Development Bank grows into a lender that matters at scale. Whether the partner tier becomes a pathway or a parking lot.
Whether the consensus survives a crisis that forces members to choose: a wider war in the Gulf, a confrontation over Taiwan, a sanctions regime that bites a member no one expected. Whether India can keep its balance as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing sharpens, because a swing weight is only valuable while it still swings.
For the generation that will inherit whatever emerges, the question worth asking is not which bloc wins. It is whether the transition now underway yields fairer rules or merely new rule-makers. BRICS cannot answer that on its own. What it has done, imperfectly and without much drama, is ensure that the question gets asked in rooms where it was once never raised. India's wager is that a hand on the pen is worth more than a fist on the table. The coming decade will show whether the pen writes something genuinely new, or simply signs the old order again in a more crowded room, with a different set of names at the bottom of the page.
(This article was contributed by Sh. Yawar Khan for abvp.org)