On September 12 and 13, New Delhi will host the 18th BRICS Summit, India’s fourth turn in the chair since 2012 and, by most measures, one of the most consequential diplomatic gatherings on Indian soil in years. Xi Jinping is expected to attend — his first visit to India since the 2019 Mamallapuram summit, held before the Galwan Valley clashes froze bilateral relations for half a decade. Vladimir Putin has confirmed he will return to Delhi for the second time within a year. For a grouping that has expanded to ten members spanning Brazil to Indonesia, hosting both leaders in the same room, in India’s own capital, is a genuine measure of how far New Delhi’s diplomatic standing has travelled.
The temptation, given the personalities involved, is to read the summit primarily as spectacle — a Modi-Xi-Putin group photo freighted with symbolism about a post-Galwan thaw or a multipolar counterweight to Washington. India should resist that framing, not because the symbolism is meaningless, but because treating it as the main event risks overshadowing the more substantive work India has actually been doing as chair. Officials have signalled a deliberately pragmatic agenda under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” — trade settlement in local currencies, supply-chain resilience, food and energy security, technology cooperation, and continued pressure for reform of institutions like the UN Security Council and IMF where the Global South remains structurally underweight. This is the agenda India should be judged on, not the seating chart.
There is also a harder-nosed calculation India needs to make about what BRICS can and cannot deliver for it. The bloc’s expanded membership — a Gulf monarchy in the UAE sitting alongside Iran, Egypt alongside Ethiopia — makes consensus considerably harder to engineer than in the founding-five era, and India’s own bilateral tensions with China over Arunachal Pradesh and the LAC have not softened even as BRICS diplomacy proceeds in parallel. India should use its chairmanship to advance genuine Global South priorities it can credibly claim credit for, without pretending that sharing a summit table with Beijing resolves what remains unresolved at the border.
Hosting BRICS well means neither underselling India’s improved global standing nor overselling a single summit’s capacity to reshape hard bilateral disputes. New Delhi has real, substantive work on the agenda. It should let that work, not the photo-op, define what September actually achieves.
— Daily Archives Editorial Desk