E-Paper
What India’s BRICS Chair secures
Author - Anu Singh Lather, vice-chancellor, Dr BR Ambedkar University and Tarun Agarwal, associate fellow, Centre of Policy Research and Governance, New Delhi.
Prefer HTon Google
The real value of a multilateral institution lies not in how often its leaders meet, but in how much influence members exercise over the rules that emerge from those meetings. As the established order comes under pressure and new centres of power assert themselves, shaping institutions is becoming as important as participating in them. This is what makes BRICS consequential for India.
Over two decades, BRICS has grown from five emerging economies into a substantial platform for economic and political cooperation, underpinned by the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement. For India, its importance lies less in what any individual summit announces than in the institutional space it provides to advance Indian interests and a more representative international order.
The chairmanship makes that opportunity more significant. India holds the chair as the grouping marks its twentieth year, hosting its first full in-person summit in the country since Goa in 2016. The chair does not control the institution, but it shapes the agenda, builds consensus and determines which areas of cooperation receive political attention. Three dimensions stand out.
The most tangible measure of BRICS’ value lies in the institutions it has created. Chartered at Fortaleza in 2014 and operational since 2015, the New Development Bank has made India, a founding member, one of its principal beneficiaries, with more than 30 projects worth over $10 billion, from the Delhi–Ghaziabad–Meerut Regional Rapid Transit System to district roads in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, the Indira Gandhi Canal in Rajasthan, and drinking water for half a million residents of Guwahati. These are long-term investments, not by-products of a diplomatic forum. During the pandemic, India also received two $1 billion emergency loans for health care and rural employment works.
The $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement is another part of this architecture, an option before a crisis becomes a vulnerability, though India has not needed to draw upon it. The financial architecture is also shifting toward local currencies: nearly 30% of NDB operations are now in local currencies, the Bank’s first rupee bond is in its final stage, and it plans $5 billion in lending to India over five years alongside a rupee bond programme of around ₹25,000 crore. This is no overnight transformation of the monetary system, but it strengthens India’s strategic resilience.
BRICS also matters because it brings together countries whose interests do not always converge. India’s participation is not an extension of any one alignment: New Delhi maintains partnerships with the US, Europe, Japan and Australia; ties with Russia and the Gulf; and deep engagement with the Global South, even as its relationship with China remains marked by strategic differences.
India has consistently argued that BRICS should help reform global institutions rather than position itself as an alternative to the West, backing greater use of national currencies and efficient cross-border payments while staying cautious about a common BRICS currency that could itself create new dependencies. The same pragmatism informed enlargement: India insisted on agreed criteria and consensus so new members such as the UAE and Egypt could widen the grouping’s reach without making it an instrument of any single agenda.
The security dimension shows why sustained engagement matters. At Xiamen in 2017, the joint declaration named Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Haqqani Network alongside Al-Qaida and ISIL, a text endorsed by all BRICS members, including China. The record has since been extended: India’s 2021 chairmanship produced the BRICS Counter-Terrorism Action Plan; the Rio de Janeiro Declaration of 2025 condemned the Pahalgam attack in the strongest terms; and BRICS foreign ministers repeated that condemnation at the UN General Assembly in September 2025, under India’s incoming chairmanship. The record was capped in September 2026, when BRICS leaders meeting in New Delhi adopted the New Delhi Declaration by consensus, no small feat, given that a foreign ministers’ meeting in the same city four months earlier had ended without a joint statement over splits on the war in West Asia. The Declaration again condemned Pahalgam in the strongest terms and reaffirmed zero tolerance for cross-border terrorism, terror financing and safe havens, without naming Pakistan directly.
The third dimension may matter most for India’s longer-term role: contributing ideas rather than simply responding to frameworks written elsewhere. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, built on Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and open payment rails such as UPI, has shown how digital systems can work at population scale, and India has taken this abroad as a model of public access and financial inclusion. This role found a concrete anchor in the New Delhi Declaration, which formally folded AI governance into BRICS cooperation alongside trade and finance, building on the BRICS Leaders’ Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence and India’s own AI Impact Summit earlier in the year. The same principle extends to BRICS cooperation on agriculture, startups, railways and skills, much of it Indian in origin, giving India’s expertise a platform within wider Global South cooperation.
The cost of hosting a summit is visible; the benefits of institutional leadership accumulate over years, and the value of a grouping this diverse lies in durable mechanisms that manage differences while common interests expand.
With Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin travelling to New Delhi alongside leaders from across the expanded grouping, India convened BRICS at a consequential moment and secured a consensus declaration despite sharp differences among members, at a time when conflicts in Europe and West Asia, trade uncertainty and pressure on supply chains have made a stable, representative international order increasingly urgent.
India does not need to turn BRICS into another geopolitical bloc. Its opportunity is to show that a diverse group of emerging powers can cooperate without strategic conformity, while advancing practical economic cooperation, stronger development institutions and sustained attention to the Global South. What India pursues from the Chair should be measured not by the number of agreements signed, but by stronger institutions and a clearer sense of what a more plural international order can look like.
That is the real significance of the chair: an opportunity not merely to participate in a changing international system, but to help shape the direction of that change.
(The views exchanged are personal)
This article is authored by Anu Singh Lather, vice-chancellor, Dr BR Ambedkar University and Tarun Agarwal, associate fellow, Centre of Policy Research and Governance, New Delhi.
