India seeks to keep BRICS unified and pragmatic as summit begins

India is hosting the 18th BRICS summit in Delhi this weekend, and the stakes for keeping the bloc together are higher than they were a year ago. The gathering brings together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—the original five—alongside five newer members: Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. That expansion from five countries to eleven has made the group harder to manage, not easier, and India's job as host is to hold it together without breaking it apart.

To do that, India's government came up with a summit slogan designed to work on two levels at once: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." The acronym still spells BRICS, but it no longer refers to the member countries by name. Instead, it describes a shared mission. Mihaela Papa, who directs the BRICS Lab at MIT, calls it elegant—a way to reinterpret the bloc so that the acronym represents what the group is trying to do rather than who belongs to it. The move reflects India's deeper calculation: keep things vague enough that no one feels left out, and neutral enough that no one feels attacked.

That neutrality matters because India itself is caught between worlds. New Delhi has been moving closer to the United States in recent years, deepening defense and trade ties with Washington. At the same time, India chairs a bloc that includes Russia and China, both of which have pushed BRICS toward a more confrontational stance toward the West. Sushant Singh, a lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale, puts it plainly: India doesn't want to offend Russia or China, but the country's enthusiasm for building up BRICS as a counterweight to Western power simply isn't there. India wants BRICS to be low-key and practical, not ideological.

What makes this year's summit different from last year's gathering in Rio de Janeiro is who is actually showing up. Twelve months ago, six of the bloc's eleven heads of state skipped the event, including major players like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, Putin is expected to attend, and Xi Jinping is widely expected, though Beijing has not yet formally confirmed. Their presence alone signals that BRICS still matters to its two largest members, and it gives the bloc more weight as a potential stabilizing force in global affairs. India will also use the summit for bilateral meetings—Modi and Putin are scheduled to meet on Friday, and the gathering gives Xi and Modi a chance to talk face-to-face amid ongoing tensions in their relationship.

Yet the internal contradictions that plague BRICS are not going away. The bloc now includes more autocracies than democracies. Many members have tense relations with each other—Iran and the UAE are regional rivals, as are Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is also expected to attend despite its membership status remaining somewhat ambiguous. Papa notes that these internal contradictions will always be hard to reconcile. Singh goes further, saying that the group will likely "continue to underwhelm." The expansion has made consensus harder to reach on almost everything. Issues ranging from China's growing global dominance to the Trump administration's tariff stance have made the bloc's already limited goals even more difficult to achieve.

What might actually get done? Papa expects progress in three areas: trade, monetary cooperation, and agriculture. Discussions will probably focus on improving trade between members, building alternative financial architecture for currency exchanges, and addressing food security. Talk of reforming global governance—pushing for better representation on bodies like the IMF and World Bank—will still be central. But India is reluctant to press for UN reform and more interested in a coordinated BRICS approach to trade and the World Trade Organization. That shared interest in WTO reform, Papa says, makes movement in that area more likely than in others.

India's role as bridge-builder between competing camps gives it a kind of clout that might actually help hold BRICS together. Papa argues that India's geopolitical weight and its relationships across different blocs make it an important stabilizing presence. Its approach is likely to keep BRICS focused on practical cooperation and global governance reform rather than overt bloc politics—which is exactly what India wants. But whether that pragmatism can overcome the bloc's fundamental lack of coherence remains an open question as the summit begins.