India needs to stop looking at BRICS as some new world order. It’s more of a hedge

Expect the Kodak moment in Delhi this weekend. BRICS provides the room and the photograph, but its most useful parts are its least theatrical ones—far less exciting on prime-time TV.

Preparations underway a day before the BRICS Summit 2026 in New Delhi | Photos: Praveen Jain | ThePrint

This weekend, Delhi will host a grouping that is simultaneously described as the voice of the developing economies, the engine of multipolarity, the challenger to Western institutions and, increasingly, a possible architect of a post-dollar world.

That is an impressive to-do for an acronym invented by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to describe four promising investment markets—Brazil, Russia, India and China (not necessarily in any order, except acronymical ease).

Brick by brick

Remember, the world had seen RIC already—the strategic triangle between a poor China, a devastated Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed and a post-1991 India—each seeking to coordinate to maximise their interests in the post-Cold War 1990s. It was Yevgeny Primakov, Russia’s then-Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister, who publicly floated the idea of a Russia-India-China ‘strategic triangle’ during his visit to New Delhi in December 1998. His logic was quite explicitly geopolitical: three large Eurasian powers should coordinate in a world dominated by the United States. India and China were initially rather lukewarm, and the first meeting of the three foreign ministers came only years later.

Interestingly, Jim O’Neill’s BRIC acronym appears to have been a separate route to almost the same destination. His 2001 Goldman Sachs paper grouped Brazil, Russia, India and China because of their growing economic weight and argued that global economic governance, particularly the G7, would eventually have to accommodate them. There is no credible evidence that O’Neill chose BRIC because he was borrowing from Primakov’s RIC triangle. In fact, O’Neill has subsequently said quite clearly that he never intended his acronym to become a political club. So in a rather nice historical accident, geopolitics produced RIC, markets produced BRIC—and diplomacy eventually married the two.

The triangle was made into a square by adding Brazil, and later into a pentagon by bringing in South Africa—and as more members kept getting added to it, its asymmetry kept growing too.

It soon acquired summits, a bank and six new members (for a total of 11), but what it still has not acquired is a common purpose.

This is where BRICS becomes a double whammy of strategic semantics. Two expressions now enjoy extraordinary popularity: the so-called ‘Global South’ and ‘Middle Power’. Nobody can quite agree what either means, but almost everybody wants to belong to one, lead it, write a strategy and, of course, organise an international conference.

Take the ‘Global South’, for instance. China, the world’s second-largest economy, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a nuclear power, the world’s manufacturing colossus and a major creditor to developing countries, insists that its ‘heart’ and ‘root’ remain in the Global South. How?

At this point, the Global South is less a coherent grouping than a strategic mood. It is perhaps the only geopolitical club whose most famous members meet without agreeing to anything in principle.

But the same elasticity is useful. It creates extra leg-room for very different, often loggerheads, national interests to be packaged into the appearance of solidarity. Foreign Affairs’ Comfort Ero has warned against treating the Global South as a coherent coalition; recent scholarship in International Affairs similarly calls it a ‘booming meta category’ in which geography, income and political alignment stubbornly refuse to match.

But the same elasticity is useful. It creates extra legroom for very different, often conflicting, national interests to be packaged into the appearance of solidarity. Foreign Affairs’ Comfort Ero has warned against treating the Global South as a coherent coalition; recent scholarship similarly calls it a “booming meta category” in which geography, income, and political alignment stubbornly refuse to match.

The same conceptual looseness and cacophony haunt ‘middle powers’: middle of what—GDP, military capability, diplomatic reach, or ambition? India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa can all be called middle powers, but so can Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, Canada and South Korea under entirely different strategic circumstances.

What BRICS+ does is put both ambiguities in one room. Does it help? No.

Why BRICS keeps growing

The ambiguities do not make BRICS irrelevant; they explain why it grows.

The international system is more volatile, transactional and less predictable. Smaller and middle powers do not necessarily want to choose between Washington and Beijing, or between Western institutions and non-Western alternatives. They want options to remain accessible. They multi-align, hedge and keep several doors open. BRICS membership, at its very core, is a policy of insurance against global uncertainty. And its growing visibility is a solemn ode to just how insecure the middle powers and growing economies feel as multilateralism has failed them in an era of growing weaponisation of everything.

India’s role is especially interesting because it provides a hedge against the hedge. Many states join BRICS partly to diversify away from excessive Western dependence and to avoid the weaponisation of that dependence. India’s presence simultaneously prevents that diversification from becoming too dependent on China. New Delhi’s presence also keeps BRICS non-Western without allowing it to become rabidly anti-Western. It sits in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), but also in the Quad and the G20; it talks aboutstrategic autonomy in one room, and technology, defence, and supply-chain resilience with the United States, Europe, and Japan in others.

That matters because the economic hierarchy inside BRICS is anything but multipolar. Before enlargement, China accounted for nearly 70 per cent of the original BRICS’ collective GDP in 2022. Enlargement has diluted that percentage, but not the basic asymmetry. China remains by far the largest economy and trading power, with a financial scale no other member matches. Its 2025 goods trade surplus alone reached roughly $1.2 trillion.

Beijing therefore has every reason to like forums in which its economic scale can be translated into political leadership. BRICS and the SCO offer precisely that terrain. The interesting question is: why does China’s rhetoric of Global South leadership sound so much louder here than in any other institution?

If debt distress is among the defining problems of the Global South, for example, the G20 already has the machinery to handle it. Under the Saudi G20 presidency in 2020, the Debt Service Suspension Initiative eventually suspended $12.9 billion in payments for 48 countries. Its successor, the Common Framework, brought Paris Club and non-Paris Club creditors—including China—into the same restructuring architecture. Yet only four countries—Chad, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Ghana—applied under it.

The framework has been slow and imperfect because of the complex dynamics among official creditors, private bondholders, IMF programmes, the comparability of treatment, and simply painful negotiations.

In short, BRICS is not growing because its members are converging; it is growing because they are hedging.

BRI & BRICS

There is another reason BRICS has become useful to Beijing. The Belt and Road Initiative no longer carries the unquestioned promise and weight it did a decade ago.

This should not be reduced to the lazy ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ caricature. Serious research has shown that Sri Lanka’s Hambantota story, for example, was far more complicated than China simply seizing an asset. If we are going to accuse Beijing of strategic laziness, let’s avoid evidentiary laziness ourselves.

But the broader record of over-promise, under-delivery, renegotiation, and implementation problems is real. AidData found major implementation problems in 3 per cent of the BRI infrastructure portfolio it studied. The Lowy Institute estimated that in 2025, the poorest and most vulnerable countries would make a record $22 billion in repayments to China, as Beijing shifted from a major net lender to a major debt collector.

South Asia supplies its own examples. Gwadar remains far less transformative than China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)’s original rhetoric suggested, while Pakistan’s own 2026 project list still shows major hydropower schemes, such as Azad Pattan and Kohala, on hold. Nepal signed onto the BRI in 2017, yet nine years later, most flagship projects remained stuck in negotiation or pre-implementation. Bangladesh, meanwhile, has not rejected Chinese finance but has asked Beijing to consider lowering interest rates on its loans.

What do these stories convey? The BRI has not delivered, but it is not disappearing either.

This is where BRICS becomes useful to China in ways the BRI has not. The BRI is unmistakably a Chinese project, but BRICS is a room full of other flags. Beijing can still exercise leadership through its economic weight and mechanisms, such as the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement.

Utilities and caveats

Ironically, the most useful parts of BRICS are its least theatrical ones.

The New Development Bank (NDB) is an important institution. At the end of 2025, it had 115 projects in its active portfolio with $35.6 billion in approved financing, and India is its second-largest recipient. Its governance is also more balanced than casual claims of Chinese domination suggest: the five founders began with equal voting shares. That is worth protecting.

But the currency story needs sobriety. The NDB is not simply a yuan-lending machine. Its portfolio is multi-currency, and local-currency operations are now approaching 30 per cent. The structural advantage for the renminbi lies elsewhere: China possesses the deepest capital market among BRICS members and the largest intra-group trading relationships.

Therefore, any hypothetical common BRICS currency or basket would entail a list of questions India should ask first: does this diversify monetary power, or does it risk converting dollar dependence into greater yuan dependence? What, exactly, does the rupee gain?

The distinction between local-currency settlement and a common currency is routinely conflated on news panels. They are not the same thing. India’s current proposal to improve interoperability among BRICS central-bank digital currencies aims to reduce transaction costs, not create a rival reserve currency. Even the Kremlin now says it is not seeking ‘de-dollarisation’—though what exactly that means is another question.

And the numbers are sobering. In the first quarter of 2026, the dollar still accounted for 57.13 per cent of reported global foreign-exchange reserves. The renminbi was 1.99 per cent.

The second useful instrument, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), deserves more attention than imaginary de-dollarisation. It is a $100-billion liquidity backstop: China committed $41 billion; India, Brazil, and Russia $18 billion each; and South Africa $5 billion. Yet 70 per cent of access remains linked to an IMF-supported programme—and the facility has never been activated in an actual crisis.

The great anti-Bretton Woods reserve mechanism thus keeps the IMF in the room. There is (almost) a joke waiting to write itself there.

Expect bilateral theatre, not strategic convergence

Then comes the geopolitics.

Xi Jinping arrives in India for the first time in seven years. The Modi-Xi bilateral will matter, and the recent eight-point consensus on the boundary question provides a useful process: more dialogue, border-management mechanisms, trade and flight links, and renewed work toward a settlement. But it is not a boundary breakthrough. It is the careful repackaging of a stabilisation process whose real test remains implementation.

So yes, expect the Kodak moment. It is not meaningless. BRICS provides the room and the photograph, but it cannot resolve the Line of Actual Control or seething tensions over the Dalai Lama’s successor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is already in town. The Russia-India bilateral will have a familiar energy, especially concerning defence and energy. But BRICS’ eleven member states cannot produce a decisive outcome to end the Ukraine war when Russia is waging it and NATO has described China as a ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia’s defence-industrial base through dual-use supplies—an assessment Beijing disputes.

West Asia makes the absurdity even more visible. Iran and the UAE are both in BRICS even after Abu Dhabi severed financial and economic ties with Tehran following Iranian attacks. Iran-aligned Houthis are again attacking Saudi cities and energy facilities while threatening the Bab el-Mandeb, critical to trade flows through Egypt’s Suez Canal. Meanwhile, the once tightly coordinated Saudi-UAE axis is visibly fractured, and Abu Dhabi quit OPEC this year.

What precisely is a BRICS joint statement supposed to reconcile here?

India, as chair, will work hard to produce one. But the statement itself is unlikely to be the summit’s most important outcome.

BRICS remains a product of global uncertainty and asymmetric power distribution, not a solution to either. It has neither enough common form nor enough common function to become the alternative world order imagined by its enthusiasts. From India’s perspective, its best future is more modest and therefore more agile: strengthening the NDB, operationalising the CRA, improving payments connectivity, financingdevelopment, and keeping a forum open among states that may otherwise disagree profoundly.

To sum up, India needs to stop looking at BRICS as some new world order. That would make it far less exciting on prime-time television—but considerably more useful.

Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant Dixit)