DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)
New Delhi has just taken its bow on the world stage. The 18th BRICS Summit, held at Bharat Mandapam on 12–13 September under India’s chairship, wrapped up with leaders unanimously adopting the New Delhi Declaration, placing renewed emphasis on reforming global governance and strengthening multilateralism. Over the course of the year, India’s presidency oversaw more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements spread across 25 cities, under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” By any measure, this was a diplomatic exercise of scale and ambition — and by most accounts, a successful one. Prime Minister Modi brought together a grouping that now includes Brazil, Russia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE, representing nearly half the world’s population and 40 per cent of global GDP, and managed to secure a consensus declaration despite sharp strategic differences among members. That is no small feat, and India deserves credit for it.
But summits in Delhi have a way of feeling very far away from Agartala. For a border state like Tripura, the real question is not whether India can host a successful summit — it clearly can — but whether the gains of that summit ever travel eastward. This is where the editorial spotlight ought to turn.
Consider what came out of India’s BRICS chairship this year: a Centre of Excellence on Agro-Ecology, a BRICS Training Hub Network with mental-health workforce development anchored at NIMHANS, a voluntary agricultural cooperation framework called AGRIN, and a joint roadmap on healthy lifestyles running through 2029. These are not abstract diplomatic gestures — they are precisely the kind of initiatives that could matter enormously to a state like Tripura, where agriculture remains a backbone of the rural economy and where public health infrastructure is still catching up with the rest of the country. The question Tripura’s policymakers and civil society should be asking is simple: has anyone in the state government engaged with these frameworks, or will they simply sit in ministry files in Delhi?
There is a pattern worth noting here. India also used its chairship to host the BRICS–BIMSTEC Outreach Summit, explicitly designed to align South Asian regional priorities — trade, energy, connectivity, infrastructure — with the wider BRICS agenda. BIMSTEC, by its very geography, is a forum where the Northeast should be a natural protagonist rather than an afterthought. Tripura sits at India’s gateway to Bangladesh and, through it, to Southeast Asia. If BRICS and BIMSTEC cooperation is genuinely about trade corridors, connectivity and investment, then Agartala’s chambers of commerce and the state’s planning department have every reason to be asking Delhi pointed questions about where the Northeast fits into this picture — and pressing for answers rather than waiting for trickle-down attention.
This is not a call for cynicism about India’s global standing. The summit’s achievements — a unanimous declaration among nations with genuinely competing interests, a demonstrated capacity to convene both Russia and China alongside countries closely aligned with the West — reflect real diplomatic skill, and Tripura, as much as any Indian state, has a stake in India’s international stature. A stronger, more respected India is generally good news for its border regions too, not least because greater diplomatic capital can translate into greater attention to connectivity and security along India’s frontiers.
But global leadership is only worth celebrating locally if it is followed by local action. With China set to take over the BRICS chairship for 2027, India’s year in the spotlight is drawing to a close. What remains is the harder, less photogenic work: translating declarations signed in Delhi into agricultural research reaching Tripura’s farmers, training hubs reaching its health workers, and trade frameworks reaching its border markets. That work does not happen through press releases. It happens when state governments in the Northeast insist on a seat at the table when national delegations decide how to operationalise these commitments.
Tripura’s own government has, in recent weeks, been consumed by matters closer to home — village committee elections, the pilot project on modern border fencing in Sepahijala, and the ongoing effort to implement the Tripura Accord with the Centre. These are legitimate and pressing local priorities. But they need not be seen as separate from the BRICS conversation. A state that can hold the Centre accountable on the Accord’s implementation is equally capable of holding it accountable on delivering the fruits of a summit it hosted in its own capital.
India’s BRICS success is a genuine national achievement. Whether it becomes Tripura’s achievement too is a matter of political will — Delhi’s, and ours.