Twenty years after foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India and China first gathered on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the expanded BRICS grouping convenes its leaders in New Delhi this weekend. India, a founding member, hosts the 18th summit under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” The gathering arrives at a moment of acute global strain: the war in West Asia has intensified after the escalation of strikes between the United States and Iran, oil markets remain volatile, and the long-running conflict in Ukraine continues to reshape alliances. The question that hangs over Bharat Mandapam is not merely ceremonial. Has BRICS remained true to the concerns that first brought its members together, and can it adapt to a world order that is changing faster than the institutions designed to manage it?
The Origins of a Counterweight
The story began as an investment banker’s forecast. In 2001, Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the term BRIC to highlight the rising weight of Brazil, Russia, India and China in the global economy. By 2006 the four countries had begun political coordination. Their first formal leaders’ summit followed in Yekaterinburg in 2009, in the shadow of the global financial crisis. South Africa’s entry in 2010 completed the original BRICS and signalled an ambition to speak for the broader developing world.
From the outset the grouping rejected formal treaty status or a permanent secretariat. It operated by consensus, preferring practical cooperation over rigid institutionalisation. That approach produced tangible results: the New Development Bank, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and a steady push for reform of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations Security Council. Intra-BRICS trade expanded dramatically. The bloc became a platform where emerging economies could coordinate positions on climate finance, development finance and the inequities of the post-1945 order without automatically aligning against the West.
Expansion and the Price of Scale
The most consequential shift came with enlargement. In 2024 Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined; Indonesia followed as a full member in 2025. Saudi Arabia’s status has remained more ambiguous in some accounts, yet official materials of successive presidencies, including India’s, treat the group as an eleven-member body. Together these countries now account for roughly 40 per cent of global GDP, nearly half the world’s population and about a quarter of global trade. The demographic and economic weight is undeniable. China alone supplies the bulk of the bloc’s output, while India, Indonesia and the energy exporters of the Gulf and Russia add scale and strategic depth.
Size, however, has sharpened internal fault lines. The original five already contained significant differences—democratic India and authoritarian China, commodity exporters and manufacturing powerhouses, energy importers and exporters. The newer members have layered additional rivalries onto that foundation: Iran and the UAE, Egypt and Ethiopia, and the persistent strategic competition between India and China. Consensus, once a pragmatic virtue, has become harder to achieve. Foreign ministers meeting earlier this year under India’s chairship could not agree on a full joint statement on the West Asian crisis and settled instead for a chair’s summary. That episode illustrated the structural tension expansion has created.
Present Tests: War, Currency and Coherence
The New Delhi summit unfolds against the backdrop of open conflict involving one of the group’s own members. Iran’s war with the United States and Israel has drawn in the UAE through retaliatory strikes and has disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for oil. BRICS now includes both a party to the conflict and several of its regional adversaries or uneasy neighbours. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to polarise opinion. China seeks to present the grouping as a multipolar alternative to Western-led institutions; India prefers to position it as a complementary, development-oriented platform that can engage both the Global South and the established powers. Brazil and South Africa often occupy the middle ground. These divergences make common positions on security questions elusive.
Economic cooperation faces its own stresses. Calls for greater use of national currencies in trade and reduced reliance on the dollar remain popular with some members, yet practical progress is uneven. India’s own trade with the rest of BRICS has grown, but so has its deficit, driven heavily by energy imports. The New Development Bank has approved tens of billions of dollars in projects, yet capitalisation and governance reforms remain works in progress. Digital public infrastructure, supply-chain resilience, green finance and technology cooperation—areas India has prioritised during its chairship—offer more promising ground for tangible outcomes than geopolitical grandstanding.
The Path Ahead
If BRICS is to remain relevant beyond its twentieth anniversary, it must confront three realities. First, expansion without corresponding mechanisms for managing disagreement risks turning the group into a talking shop. Consensus remains valuable, but it cannot become a synonym for paralysis. Second, the grouping’s greatest comparative advantage lies in practical economic and developmental cooperation rather than in attempting to replicate the security architecture of existing alliances. Focusing on resilient supply chains, local-currency settlement systems that actually work, climate adaptation finance and technology transfer will do more for its members than rhetorical challenges to the existing order. Third, the largest members—China, India and Russia—must accept that their bilateral disputes and strategic preferences cannot be allowed to dominate the agenda if the platform is to retain credibility with smaller and newer participants.
India’s chairmanship has emphasised a “humanity first” approach and the four pillars of resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. That framing is well suited to a diverse membership. It allows the group to speak for the Global South without requiring every member to adopt an identical geopolitical posture. Whether the New Delhi declaration can translate that approach into concrete, implementable outcomes will be the immediate test.
BRICS was never intended to become a rigid anti-Western bloc. Its original impulse was reformist: to secure greater voice and more equitable rules for rising economies inside a system still dominated by the architecture of 1945. That impulse remains valid. The expanded grouping now possesses the demographic and economic mass to influence the direction of global governance. Whether it can convert mass into coherent agency depends on its willingness to manage internal diversity rather than paper over it. Twenty years on, the experiment is no longer an investment banker’s acronym. It is a living, contested arena in a world order that is itself unfinished. The leaders meeting in New Delhi this weekend will help determine whether that arena remains constructive—or becomes another casualty of the very fractures it was created to navigate.
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai….
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.
