A Bloc Turns Twenty, and India Takes the Wheel Again
On September 12, 2026, the Indian capital transformed into a stage for global diplomacy as leaders from eleven nations converged on the Bharat Mandapam convention center for the 18th BRICS Summit. The two-day gathering, running through September 13, marks a milestone moment for the grouping: BRICS is celebrating twenty years since its founding, and India is chairing the bloc for a record fourth time, having previously held the position in 2012, 2016, and 2021.
The symbolism was hard to miss. Streets around New Delhi were dressed in BRICS themed banners, roundabouts were illuminated, and murals welcomed dignitaries into a city under unprecedented security. Authorities deployed roughly 30,000 additional security personnel and shut down traffic around the hotels housing visiting heads of state, turning parts of the capital into a fortress for the duration of the summit.
Who Showed Up
The guest list read like a roll call of the emerging world order. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived early to hold bilateral talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of the main sessions. Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first visit to Delhi since 2014, marking the third consecutive year he and Modi have met in person, following earlier encounters in Kazan and Tianjin. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el Sisi, and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed were also present, alongside UN Secretary General António Guterres.
Notably absent was Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who stayed home to attend to local elections; Brazil was instead represented by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira. Modi also used the occasion for a flurry of bilateral diplomacy, including a meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The expanded guest list reflects how dramatically BRICS has grown. What began in 2006 as a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa joining in 2010, has since swelled to eleven full members. The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia became full members in January 2024, and Indonesia joined in January 2025. Combined, the bloc’s members now account for an estimated 49 percent of the world’s population and 40 percent of global GDP, giving the grouping considerable heft in conversations about the future of the global economy.
The Agenda: Trade, Technology, and a Changing World Order
India structured its chairship around the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” paired with what officials describe as a people centric and humanity first approach. Over the course of 2026, India convened more than 350 meetings and high level engagements across 25 Indian cities, spanning the bloc’s three traditional pillars: political and security cooperation, economic and financial cooperation, and cultural and people to people exchange.
At the summit itself, discussions centered on economic growth, trade and investment, energy and food security, technology, and the resilience of global supply chains. A recurring theme across BRICS gatherings this year has been the push to reduce reliance on the US dollar, with member states promoting greater use of their own currencies for trade and payments and floating alternatives to Western dominated financial institutions. Russia, in particular, arrived in New Delhi eager to discuss trade settlements conducted in digital currencies with fellow BRICS partners.
One tangible outcome from India’s chairship year was the launch of the BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle, alongside a roadmap for a joint initiative on healthy lifestyle promotion running from 2026 to 2029. The program is designed to serve as a platform for technical cooperation and knowledge exchange, with an emphasis on preventive, life course approaches to obesity and non communicable diseases, a sign that BRICS cooperation increasingly extends beyond economics and into public health.
Geopolitics in the Room
Even as the summit’s official agenda emphasized trade and development, geopolitical tensions loomed large. The war in Ukraine and the ongoing conflict in West Asia were among the most closely watched topics, not least because BRICS members themselves are split on how to characterize them. Iran and the United Arab Emirates, both BRICS members, sit on opposite sides of the Gulf conflict, and reconciling their positions proved to be one of the thornier tasks facing summit negotiators in the run up to the gathering.
That tension had already surfaced earlier in the year: when BRICS foreign ministers met in New Delhi in May, they failed to agree on a joint communique addressing the West Asia conflict. India, as chair, issued a standalone chair’s statement and outcome document instead, one that acknowledged the divisions among members while calling for an early end to the conflict and a return to diplomatic channels.
Ahead of the leaders’ summit, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged that these unresolved differences were having what he called a negative impact on preparations for a joint declaration. Diplomats spent the days before the summit working to bridge the gap between Iran and the UAE specifically so that a unified statement could be issued once leaders arrived.
The New Delhi Declaration
The summit is set to conclude with the release of the New Delhi Declaration, expected to lay out the key outcomes and commitments agreed upon by participating countries. According to reporting ahead of the summit’s conclusion, negotiators reached a compromise: the declaration would condemn unilateral wars and the imposition of conflict, but without naming any specific country or aggressor. This kind of studied ambiguity is a familiar diplomatic device for BRICS, a bloc that includes members with sharply differing, sometimes opposing, foreign policy interests, and which has historically preferred consensus driven statements over pointed condemnations.
The declaration was reportedly finalized only after extended negotiations aimed at satisfying both Iran and the UAE, underscoring just how difficult it can be for an eleven member bloc with such diverse geopolitical alignments to speak with one voice. Leaders were expected to formally approve the document during the summit’s proceedings.
A Contest of Influence
Western media coverage of the summit has framed it as a barometer of a shifting global order. Commentary in outlets such as The New York Times has focused on an underlying question: whether Modi or Xi Jinping would emerge as the more influential voice representing the developing world’s interests. The framing reflects a broader strategic divergence within BRICS itself. China has increasingly positioned the bloc as a vehicle for challenging American economic and political dominance, while India has pushed to keep the grouping broad and non-aligned, wary of forcing member states, many of which maintain close ties with Washington, into an explicit binary choice between competing global blocs.
Analysts point to a confluence of pressures pushing countries to reconsider their relationships with both the United States and China: prolonged regional wars, elevated energy prices, US tariff policy, and rising anxiety about the trajectory of artificial intelligence and its concentration among a handful of powerful nations. For India specifically, BRICS offers a unique diplomatic instrument, a platform that allows it to deepen engagement with China, Russia, and Gulf states while simultaneously preserving its broader strategic partnerships with Western democracies.
What Comes Next
As the summit wraps up on September 13, attention will turn to how faithfully the New Delhi Declaration’s commitments are implemented over the coming year, and to who inherits the BRICS chairship next. For now, though, the optics were unmistakable: two decades after four emerging economies first banded together under an acronym coined by a Goldman Sachs economist, BRICS convened in New Delhi as a genuinely global coalition, one large enough, and consequential enough, that even its internal disagreements have become a matter of worldwide diplomatic scrutiny.
