DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)
There is a familiar rhythm to how a chunk of the Western press covers BRICS: the summit convenes, the group’s internal diversity is treated as proof of dysfunction, the joint declaration is dismissed as toothless, and India’s leadership — this year as summit host — is framed as “controversial” rather than consequential. It happened again after the 18th BRICS Summit concluded in New Delhi on 13 September. And once again, the coverage said less about BRICS than it did about the lens through which it was being viewed.
Start with the numbers, because numbers are where this argument should begin and end. BRICS today accounts for roughly 40 per cent of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, and its eleven member states are home to somewhere between 48 and 49.5 per cent of the world’s population — nearly four billion people. This is not a symbolic talking shop. It is, by sheer economic and demographic weight, the largest bloc of nations ever assembled outside the Western-led post-war order. To describe a grouping of that scale as marginal, fractious, or irrelevant requires either not knowing the numbers or declining to sit with what they mean.
What did New Delhi actually deliver? A unanimous joint declaration — no small achievement given that this BRICS+ now spans Russia and China on one end and Gulf monarchies and a NATO-adjacent Indonesia on the other, nations with sharply divergent worldviews and, in some cases, open rivalries. Beyond the declaration, the summit advanced concrete cooperation frameworks: on agro-ecology, on public health training, on digital public infrastructure, and on deepening local-currency trade mechanisms that reduce dependence on a single reserve currency. These are not headline-grabbing spectacles. They are the unglamorous machinery of institution-building — exactly the kind of work that, when the G7 or the IMF does it, gets described as “reform,” but when BRICS does it, gets described as “posturing.”
That asymmetry is the real story here, and it is worth naming plainly. When Western institutions expand their remit, it is coverage as governance. When the Global South does the same, it is coverage as spectacle. Disagreements among BRICS members — and there are real ones, on Ukraine, on the Middle East, on trade — are treated by much of the Western press not as the normal friction of any eleven-member coalition, but as evidence that the entire project is hollow. No such standard is applied to the G7, whose members have disagreed openly on tariffs, on Gaza, and on Russia policy without commentators declaring the group finished.
None of this is an argument that BRICS is beyond criticism. It has genuine and serious challenges: China’s economy dwarfs every other member’s, raising legitimate questions about whether this is a coalition of equals or a coalition with one very large shareholder. Its members do not share a political system, a human-rights framework, or a foreign-policy outlook, and pretending otherwise would be its own form of narrative-building. A fair editorial position does not ask readers to trade one uncritical narrative for another.
But fair criticism and reflexive dismissal are not the same thing, and a great deal of what passed for BRICS “analysis” this month was the latter. The tell is usually in the framing: India’s chairship became “controversial” rather than simply significant; a summit that produced a rare unanimous declaration among rival powers became evidence of the bloc’s limits rather than its capacity; and the participation of Asian, African, Latin American and West Asian leaders — a genuinely unprecedented convening — was reduced to a footnote beneath speculation about internal tensions.
This matters beyond diplomatic vanity. Global South solidarity is not a slogan; it is a practical response to decades in which trade rules, reserve currencies, and multilateral institutions were designed elsewhere and applied everywhere else. BRICS’ economic weight is now real enough that dismissing it outright requires willful blindness, and the media houses still doing so are, whether they intend it or not, signalling how uncomfortable a genuinely multipolar world remains for institutions built to describe a unipolar one.
India hosted a summit that produced consensus among genuine rivals and advanced concrete cooperation on agriculture, health and trade. That is a defensible, measurable outcome — not a talking point requiring Western validation to be real. As the chairship passes to China for 2027, the more useful exercise for commentators everywhere, in Delhi and in Washington alike, would be to judge BRICS by what it actually built this year, not by how well it conforms to a story written about it before the summit even began.