Bringing coherence & cohesion to BRICS

With a nose-to-the-ground constructive approach, India has left no stone unturned in generating substantive outcomes from its BRICS presidency.

As India prepares to host the 18th summit of the BRICS group of emerging and developing countries on September 12 and 13, it has the responsibility to steer the institution through trying circumstances. The key imperative for India’s presidency — and for the future of the grouping that has just completed 20 years — is managing the challenges and harnessing the opportunities to deliver concrete results for approximately 50% of the world’s population, represented by its 11 member-States.

More policies and less politics will do BRICS a world of good in its third decade, and India’s presidency is showing the way. (Photo credit: Shutterstock)

With wars raging worldwide and geopolitical faultlines widening, BRICS is being buffeted by a range of centrifugal forces. Two divisive strands derived from the global polarisation are impairing cohesion and coherence in the grouping.

The first is the traditional divergence among its member-States along the lines of pro-West versus anti-West orientations. This internal dialectic has nagged BRICS since its inception in 2006 and is still playing out.

Russia and China seek to turn BRICS into an anti-West bloc by pushing for a separate BRICS currency, “de-dollarisation” to weaken American financial hegemony, and the setting up of a BRICS Pay mechanism to bypass western economic sanctions and blunt the monopoly of the Belgium-headquartered SWIFT banking network.

Given this internecine discord, the New Delhi BRICS summit will not generate any revolutionary departure or breakthrough that could be interpreted as a slap in the face of the US. The standard BRICS condemnation of unilateral western sanctions and military interventions that violate the sovereignty of nation-States, and the continued encouragement of intra-BRICS trade in local currencies, will surely find mention in the final communiqué. But Russia and China (backed by Iran) will not succeed in turning the BRICS Plus into a military or economic bloc to rival the US and Europe.

The second geopolitical headwind for BRICS is the fissure among its West Asian members — especially Iran and the UAE — in the context of the devastating war they are embroiled in. The logjam at the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in May 2026, where no joint declaration could be issued amid acrimonious exchanges between the Iranian and Emirati camps over who the aggressor is and who the victim is, is a sign that the expanded BRICS will face greater risks from spiralling regional conflicts.

As the host and being a country with considerable diplomatic experience in bridging gaps and building consensus in bigger multilateral institutions such as G20, India can negotiate a minimally acceptable common text that will satisfy warring parties and ensure that the BRICS summit ends with a joint declaration. Neither the “West versus the rest” nor the “Iran versus UAE” split is likely to sink the 2026 New Delhi Declaration of BRICS. But these strains do place limits on how far and deep the group can go on one of its core pillars — political and security cooperation.

As a quintessential pragmatic multilateralist, India has historically not seen BRICS as a venue or a medium to exacerbate bilateral enemities or wage new Cold Wars. New Delhi has worked over the past two decades to direct the combined energies of BRICS member-countries toward the other two core pillars of the institution — economic and financial cooperation and people-to-people exchanges.

Towards these ends, the Indian presidency of BRICS in 2026 organised 350 meetings and high-level engagements, including 22 ministerials, eight heads of agencies gatherings, and dozens of working groups and forums held across 25 cities in the country. Even though the foreign ministers failed to reach a consensus on the “high politics” issues, India has succeeded in producing joint declarations and plans of action in the industry and trade tracks, the science, technology and environment tracks, the legal and governance tracks, and the social, educational, and cultural tracks.

With a nose-to-the-ground constructive approach, India has left no stone unturned in generating substantive outcomes from its BRICS presidency that prioritise the interests of ordinary people of its member-States and of the wider Global South. India’s agenda-setting initiatives such as farmer-centric agriculture, women-led development, universal energy access, prevention of mass infectious diseases, climate resilience and disaster risk reduction, urban mobility, resilient logistics and supply chains, have ensured that BRICS does not renege on its core developmental goals. India has also used its BRICS presidency to showcase its unique strengths in fields like Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as cross-cutting developmental tools, and actively shaped the growth of the BRICS sub-institutions such as the New Development Bank (NDB), the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism (ICM) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) — all of which give BRICS a reputation as a doer.

Through its “people-centric” vision, India is trying to keep the focus of BRICS on tangible takeaways that benefit all rather than on incendiary themes that reduce efficiency and induce failure. More policies and less politics will do BRICS a world of good in its third decade, and India’s presidency is showing the way.

Sreeram Chaulia is dean, Jindal School of International Affairs. The views expressed are personal