BRICS in New Delhi: India's chair year and the limits of consensus

India chaired BRICS in 2026 and hosted the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on 12–13 September 2026, under the theme Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. The grouping now has eleven members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — accounting, by the chair's account, for about 49 per cent of the world's population and 40 per cent of global GDP. The summit capped more than 400 BRICS meetings across 30 Indian cities, and adopted the New Delhi Declaration by consensus, despite divergence among members on West Asia, notably between Iran and the UAE.

The declaration's political messages were carefully balanced. Members condemned unilateral tariffs and sanctions, supported reform of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations Security Council, and called for maximum restraint in West Asia without attributing blame. On economics, the bloc again declined to endorse a common currency, favouring payment-system interoperability and local-currency settlement instead. Institutional outcomes included a BRICS Incubator Network, a Startup Innovation Fund, a Grain Exchange framework, a logistics and supply-chain cooperation framework, a digital public infrastructure repository, and a 2026–2030 Global Value Chain Action Plan. India also proposed a ten-point global governance reform roadmap based on representation, responsiveness and rule-making.

The summit's symbolism mattered as much as its text. Xi Jinping attended in person, his first visit to India since 2019, and Vladimir Putin also participated, demonstrating India's ability to engage multiple major powers simultaneously while facing American tariff pressure linked to its Russian crude imports. The Modi–Putin meeting set a bilateral trade target of 100 billion dollars by 2030, and the Modi–Xi meeting addressed border stabilisation and economic normalisation, though neither meeting resolved the underlying disputes. India used the summit to present BRICS as a platform for Global South representation and practical cooperation rather than an explicitly anti-Western bloc.

The limits were equally visible. BRICS has no permanent secretariat with dedicated expertise, funding and negotiating authority, and most of the summit's measures remain at the framework stage. The trade arithmetic also cuts against the rhetoric: India's deficit with BRICS partners widened to a reported 226 billion dollars in 2025–26, from 75 billion dollars in 2021, even as India targeted 200 billion dollars of exports to BRICS by 2030. The test of India's chair year, as analysts noted, is whether portals, frameworks and declarations turn into orders, settlements and reforms under China's chairmanship in 2027.