The BRICS summit in New Delhi has produced exactly the kind of image India wanted: Narendra Modi hosting Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Masoud Pezeshkian and leaders from across the Global South, with Xi visiting India for the first time in seven years after the severe deterioration in relations following the 2020 Galwan clash. The expanded BRICS now brings together countries as different as India, China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia, and the summit adopted a joint declaration calling for restraint in the renewed Middle Eastern conflict while criticising unilateral tariffs and economic restrictions. China has simultaneously proposed deeper BRICS cooperation in artificial intelligence, trade, investment and payment systems, while Russia wants the organisation to become a stronger alternative centre of global economic power. It is tempting either to celebrate this as the arrival of a new multipolar world or dismiss BRICS as an incoherent collection of countries united mainly by dissatisfaction with the West. I think both readings miss the more interesting point: BRICS matters precisely because its members do not agree on everything. It is testing whether international order can become more plural without simply replacing Western dominance with another hierarchy.
India’s role makes this contradiction especially visible. New Delhi wants reform of institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and UN Security Council because the distribution of influence created after 1945 no longer reflects contemporary population or economic weight. That argument is difficult to reject completely. India is the world’s most populous country and one of its largest economies, yet still lacks permanent membership of the Security Council. BRICS gives India a platform through which to demand greater representation without waiting for existing powers voluntarily to surrender influence. But institutional reform raises an uncomfortable question: does India want a world in which power is genuinely distributed more equally, or simply one in which India receives a larger share of great-power privilege? Multipolarity is not automatically democratisation at the international level. Five dominant powers becoming eight dominant powers can still leave smaller states with very little influence.
China presents the clearest version of this problem. Xi used the summit to propose a BRICS AI Open Source Zone, greater economic integration, special economic-zone cooperation and stronger payment links. These initiatives could genuinely benefit developing economies by reducing transaction costs and expanding access to technology. Yet China is by far the largest economy inside BRICS and possesses industrial and financial capabilities other members cannot match. Reuters notes that India has already resisted Chinese-linked payment architecture such as mBridge because whoever controls settlement infrastructure can acquire significant influence over the system. India therefore faces a paradox: it wants BRICS strong enough to reduce Western dominance, but not so China-centred that escaping one hierarchy merely places India inside another.
This is why institutional design matters more than rhetoric about the Global South. Payment networks, development banks and digital infrastructure are not politically neutral simply because they are alternatives to Western institutions. Whoever sets technical standards, controls data or supplies most financing gains structural influence. The dollar-centred financial system gives America power partly because so much international activity passes through American institutions. A BRICS system dominated overwhelmingly by Chinese technology could reproduce the same mechanism with Beijing at its centre. The political problem is therefore not dependence itself, which is unavoidable in an interconnected economy, but concentrated dependence without credible alternatives.
India’s relationship with China demonstrates how carefully New Delhi is trying to manage that risk. Modi and Xi met during the summit as the two countries continue their cautious diplomatic thaw, while trade between them remains enormous despite persistent distrust over the border, technology and investment. Bilateral trade reached a record $155.6 billion in 2025, with India importing roughly $132 billion from China. India therefore cannot treat China simply as an adversary without imposing substantial costs on its own manufacturing economy. But it also cannot ignore the strategic vulnerability created when important Indian industries depend heavily on Chinese components and equipment. The rational response is selective de-risking rather than either naïve integration or total decoupling.
Russia presents a different challenge. Putin used his visit to argue that BRICS should create a global growth platform less vulnerable to Western sanctions and economic coercion, while India and Russia reiterated plans to raise bilateral trade from nearly $70 billion to $100 billion by 2030. India has legitimate reasons to preserve the relationship: Russian energy, defence links and Eurasian diplomacy remain useful, and New Delhi has consistently rejected the idea that Western sanctions should automatically determine Indian trade policy. Yet strategic autonomy should not become an intellectual excuse for treating every partner’s behaviour as morally equivalent. Independence in foreign policy is most credible when it allows India to apply its own principles rather than merely refusing other countries’ principles.
The renewed US-Iran conflict makes the summit’s diplomacy even more revealing. BRICS includes Iran and the UAE, states positioned very differently in the Gulf confrontation, yet members still managed to produce a consensus declaration urging maximum restraint and diplomatic resolution. This may appear vague, but consensus among states with genuinely conflicting interests has some value. International institutions should not be judged solely by whether they produce strong declarations. Sometimes their function is simply maintaining channels through which adversaries can communicate without accepting one another’s political positions.
This is where BRICS differs fundamentally from NATO. NATO can make deep security commitments because its members share enough strategic alignment to accept collective defence obligations. BRICS includes India and China, Iran and the UAE, democracies and authoritarian systems, commodity exporters and major importers. It cannot plausibly become an equivalent alliance without losing much of its membership. Its strength therefore comes partly from its shallowness: governments can cooperate on payments, development finance or institutional reform without agreeing about every geopolitical conflict.
That may actually make BRICS better suited to a multipolar world than attempts to construct another rigid bloc. The Cold War encouraged states to organise foreign policy around relatively stable camps. Contemporary powers increasingly prefer issue-specific alignment. India can cooperate with America and Japan in the Quad, buy Russian energy, negotiate with China inside BRICS and deepen trade with Europe simultaneously. The UAE can maintain an American security relationship while sitting in the same organisation as Iran. These arrangements look inconsistent only if foreign policy is assumed to require ideological loyalty to one camp.
The danger is that multipolarity can increase freedom for states while weakening common rules between them. A world with more centres of power gives countries alternatives when one great power becomes coercive. But it also makes sanctions harder, collective action slower and enforcement of international law more selective. States can shop between competing institutions and patrons. This increases bargaining power for developing countries but can also reduce the ability of the international system to respond coherently to aggression, financial crises or climate change.
This is why India’s vision should ideally be pluralist rather than merely multipolar. Multipolarity describes a distribution of power. Pluralism describes a political order in which several centres of power coexist under rules none completely controls. The first can produce nineteenth-century great-power competition. The second offers something more ambitious: institutions where America, China, India, Europe and others remain powerful without any one possessing the authority to determine the rules unilaterally.
Achieving that requires India to resist both Western and Chinese attempts to convert economic dependence into political obedience. It also requires India to accept constraints on its own power as it becomes stronger. This is the difficult test of whether a state genuinely believes in a rules-based order: does it still support rules when those rules prevent it from doing something it could otherwise force a weaker country to accept?
The New Delhi summit therefore should not be celebrated simply because powerful leaders came to India or because photographs of Modi, Xi and Putin symbolise a changing world. India’s diplomatic achievement is more meaningful if BRICS becomes a forum through which developing countries gain additional options without being required to exchange one dependency for another.
The most successful international order for India would not be one in which the United States loses and BRICS wins, or China replaces America at the centre. It would be one in which no single centre becomes powerful enough that everyone else’s sovereignty depends upon remaining in its favour. BRICS can contribute to that order, but only if it remains a mechanism for distributing power rather than concentrating it somewhere new.
