BRICS has expanded to 11 full members, with 10 additional partner countries now participating without full voting rights.
NEW DELHI: India will host the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam on September 12-13, marking two decades since Brazil, Russia, India and China first formalised the BRIC grouping at the UN General Assembly in 2006. This is India’s fourth chairship, following 2012, 2016 and 2021 and its first hosting the bloc since membership expanded to 11 full countries. The theme, “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” reflects what the Ministry of External Affairs frames as Prime Minister Modi’s “Humanity First” approach to multilateralism.
The real story of this summit, though, is whether an increasingly large and ideologically diverse bloc can still produce meaningful consensus, a question India got a preview answer to in May.
Who’s Actually in the Room
BRICS now comprises five founding members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), five countries that joined in 2024 (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE), and Indonesia, which joined in January 2025. A separate Partner Country tier includes ten nations, from Belarus to Vietnam, engaged in working tracks without full voting rights. Confirmed or expected attendees include Putin, Xi Jinping, Iran’s Pezeshkian and leaders from South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia and Brazil, alongside high-level representatives from the Gulf states.
What India Actually Built This Year
Beyond the summit theatre, India ran over 350 ministerial and working-group engagements across 25-plus cities in 2026, producing concrete, if unglamorous, deliverables. These include a BRICS Global Value Chains Action Plan aimed at integrating MSMEs into supply chains, proposals to link national fast-payment systems like UPI, Russia’s SPFS and China’s CIPS for cheaper cross-border transactions, a Startup Innovation Hub, a Digital Agriculture Network, a mental wellness cooperation framework coordinated through NIMHANS Bengaluru and a Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids launched in Gurugram. Notably, India has consistently framed payment interoperability as a practical efficiency tool rather than an anti-dollar political statement, a distinction that matters given Washington’s sensitivity to “de-dollarisation” rhetoric.
The May Warning Sign
The clearest evidence of how fragile consensus has become came at the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi in May, when ministers failed to produce a fully negotiated joint communiqué for the first time during an Indian chairship year. Instead, India issued a dual-track “Chair’s Statement,” with 63 negotiated paragraphs alongside explicitly recorded divergences. The fracture centred on West Asia: Iran pushed for language condemning US-Israeli operations, while Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both maintaining close security ties with Washington, resisted framing BRICS as an anti-Western bloc. Negotiators ultimately fell back on language recycled from the 2025 Rio Summit, reaffirming a two-state solution and Gaza ceasefire while dropping earlier, sharper condemnations of settlement expansion. Counter-terrorism proved the one area of unanimous agreement, with the statement condemning the Pahalgam terror attack “in the strongest terms.”
India’s Balancing Act
This tension captures India’s central challenge as chair: keeping BRICS “non-Western” without letting it drift “anti-Western.” New Delhi has consistently resisted Russian and Iranian pushes to turn the bloc into an explicit counterweight to Washington, a stance necessary to protect India’s parallel relationships with the US, Europe and Quad partners. Whether that balancing act holds at the leaders’ level, where stakes and scrutiny are higher than at the ministerial track, is the summit’s central uncertainty.
Money Moves in Parallel
Running alongside the diplomatic summit is the inaugural iBRICS Summit, organised independently by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute at The Oberoi on the same two days. This invitation-only gathering brings together over 500 institutional investors, including 250 sovereign wealth fund principals representing more than $1 trillion in combined assets, to discuss non-dollar transaction corridors and co-investment structures. A “Sovereign Capital Compact” is scheduled for signing on September 12, focused on critical minerals, renewable energy, ports and digital infrastructure, effectively a private capital deal room operating in parallel to the political declarations at Bharat Mandapam.
Three Ways This Could Go
Analysts are watching for one of three outcomes: a full consensus Joint Declaration covering political and economic tracks (optimistic), a declaration heavy on economic deliverables but generalised on politically sensitive issues like West Asia (the likely baseline, echoing May’s compromise language) or another failure to reach consensus, forcing reliance on a Chair’s statement alone (the constrained scenario, which would signal deepening internal strain).
The Bilateral Meetings That Might Matter More
Given the difficulty of full-bloc consensus, sidelines conversations carry real weight. Modi-Xi talks will likely touch on Line of Actual Control border management and trade imbalances. Modi-Putin discussions are expected to cover crude oil supply, local currency settlement and the Ukraine conflict. Modi-Pezeshkian talks will probably focus on the Chabahar Port corridor and Strait of Hormuz security, both directly relevant to India’s energy and connectivity interests.
What to Watch For
Success for India’s chairship would look like a formally adopted Global Value Chains Action Plan, a clear roadmap on payment system linkages without anti-Western framing, and explicit UN Security Council reform language. Warning signs would include another failed Leaders’ Declaration, watered-down maritime security language or visible friction between Gulf and Iranian delegations during plenary sessions. Beyond the summit itself, longer-term questions loom: whether an 11-member consensus body can function as regional conflicts multiply among its own members, whether payment interoperability translates into actual trade volume and how efficiently the ten Partner Countries get folded into working structures without diluting full-member decision-making.
For India, this summit is as much a test of chairship credibility as it is a diplomatic showcase, one where the substance of a joint declaration, or its absence, will say more than the venue’s architecture ever could.
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