BRICS Summit in India Seeks Unity, but Bloc's Purpose Remains Unclear

Delhi is hosting the 18th BRICS summit this weekend, and for the first time in a year, the bloc's two largest powers will show up. Chinese President Xi Jinping is widely expected, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has confirmed he will attend—a stark contrast to last year's gathering in Rio de Janeiro, where six of the eleven heads of state simply did not come, including both Xi and Putin. The difference matters. India, as this year's chair, has positioned itself as a stabilizing force, and the presence of these leaders signals at least a surface-level commitment to the organization's continued relevance.

But relevance to what, exactly? That remains the harder question. India's summit slogan—"Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability"—is a deliberate linguistic maneuver. The acronym still spells BRICS, honoring the five original members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Yet it also encompasses the five newer members added in recent years: Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. According to Mihaela Papa, director of the BRICS Lab at MIT, the rebranding represents "an elegant way to reinterpret BRICS so that the acronym represents a joint mission rather than country names." It is, in other words, a solution to a problem that has no clean answer: how do you keep a bloc together when its members have fundamentally different interests and ideologies?

India's own position reveals the tension at the heart of BRICS. The country has grown closer to the United States in recent years, deepening defense and trade ties with Washington. Yet as a non-aligned nation with significant geopolitical weight, India also maintains relationships across competing camps. Sushant Singh, a lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale, argues that India's reluctance to embrace what he calls the "anti-western turn" that BRICS has taken in recent times shapes everything about how Delhi is approaching this summit. "India doesn't want to offend Russia or China, but the fact is that Indians are looking more towards the United States these days," Singh told DW. "The desire to build up BRICS is not there." India's vision for the bloc, he suggests, centers on practical matters—improved trade ties, functional cooperation—rather than confrontation with the West or sweeping reforms to the global order.

The bloc itself has grown unwieldy. Expanded from five members to eleven (or twelve if Saudi Arabia's ambiguous status is counted as full membership), BRICS now encompasses both democracies and autocracies, countries with tense bilateral relationships, and leaders with competing regional ambitions. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is expected to attend, but the UAE's leader is sending representatives instead. Saudi Arabia, another Iranian rival, is also expected. That these regional adversaries are nominally part of the same organization speaks to BRICS' central weakness: it has become large enough to claim nearly half the world's population and around 40 percent of global GDP, yet too diverse to speak with one voice on matters that truly divide its members.

Last year's joint declaration called for reforms to global governance structures, specifically demanding greater representation on bodies like the IMF and World Bank. It condemned tariffs and lamented what it termed the "polarization" of the international order. Yet these remain aspirational statements rather than coordinated policy. Papa notes that BRICS remains "focused on practical, functional cooperation while seeking to avoid geopolitical tensions." The expansion has made consensus harder to reach, and the internal contradictions—between members with competing interests, between those aligned with the West and those opposed to it—are not easily reconciled.

What might actually emerge from this weekend's gathering? Papa expects limited but real progress in three specific areas: trade between members, alternative financial architecture for currency exchange, and agricultural cooperation. India, she notes, is particularly keen on a coordinated BRICS approach to the World Trade Organization, an ambition shared by enough members to make movement plausible. Singh, however, remains skeptical. "With the kind of world that we are in and the lack of coherence and internal contradictions that BRICS has, it's very unlikely that it will achieve anything major," he says. The bilateral meetings—Putin with Modi on Friday, Xi with Modi during the summit itself—may prove more consequential than any bloc-wide declaration. For India, the summit's value lies not in forging a unified global alternative to Western-led institutions, but in maintaining relationships across a fractured world. Whether that is enough to justify BRICS' continued existence remains an open question.