TheInterviewTimes.com | September 11, 2026 | New Delhi
BRICS 2026 tests India’s strategic autonomy as New Delhi balances China, Russia and Iran while maintaining strong ties with the US and West.
India is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12–13 at a moment when the grouping has become far more consequential, but also far more difficult to manage.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian are among the leaders expected in Delhi. For India, the summit is not simply an opportunity to showcase its diplomatic reach. It is a test of whether New Delhi can make an increasingly diverse BRICS work while protecting its own relationships with the United States, Europe and other Western partners.
That is the central contradiction of BRICS 2026. The grouping is expanding in size and economic weight, yet its members do not necessarily share the same geopolitical objectives. India wants BRICS to give greater voice to the Global South and push for more representative global institutions. It does not, however, appear interested in turning the group into a formal anti-Western alliance.
The question for New Delhi, therefore, is not whether India can choose between China, Russia, Iran and the West. It is whether India can work with all of them where its interests overlap without becoming strategically dependent on any one of them.
Delighted to meet President Putin in Delhi, less than two weeks after our meeting in Bishkek.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 11, 2026
During today’s meeting we talked about:
Closer trade ties, including implementation of the Programme for Economic Cooperation 2030.
Cooperation in areas like infrastructure, energy,… pic.twitter.com/nLaMDxnDEc
BRICS has become too important for India to ignore
BRICS began as a grouping of major emerging economies. Its expansion has changed its character.
The current full membership includes Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. According to the Indian government, the expanded grouping represents about 49.5 percent of the world’s population, 40 percent of global GDP and 26 percent of global trade.
Those numbers give BRICS considerable weight. But numbers alone do not make a geopolitical bloc.
The members have different economic structures, security interests and relationships with the United States and China. Some want a stronger alternative to Western-dominated institutions. Others want greater representation in existing institutions without abandoning the current international economic system.
That distinction matters for India.
New Delhi has consistently sought greater strategic autonomy rather than membership of competing geopolitical camps. BRICS is useful to India precisely because it gives New Delhi a platform to engage countries it may not agree with on every issue.
The challenge is making that platform deliver something tangible.
China is the biggest test
No country creates a more complicated calculation for India inside BRICS than China.
India and China are major trading partners and both are important voices in the Global South. At the same time, their relationship remains constrained by the unresolved border question, strategic competition in Asia and a significant trade imbalance.
Xi Jinping’s presence in Delhi gives this year’s summit an additional dimension. It will be his first visit to India in seven years. His attendance comes during a cautious improvement in bilateral engagement, but the underlying disagreements have not disappeared.
That makes the Modi-Xi interaction potentially more important than many of the formal BRICS declarations.
India does not need BRICS to resolve the India-China relationship. Nor is that realistic.
What New Delhi needs is a mechanism in which competition and cooperation can coexist.
Trade, investment, supply chains, technology, energy security and multilateral reform are areas where both countries have reasons to keep talking. The border remains a separate and more sensitive issue.
This is where India’s diplomacy will be tested. If cooperation with China inside BRICS becomes too confrontational toward the West, India’s wider foreign-policy room could narrow. If India allows China to dominate the agenda, BRICS could become less useful to New Delhi.
The balance will have to be maintained issue by issue.
Russia remains important, but the relationship is changing
Russia presents a different calculation.
India’s relationship with Moscow has survived enormous geopolitical changes. Russia remains important to India for energy, defence, nuclear cooperation and other strategic interests. Bilateral trade has also grown substantially in recent years, particularly because of energy flows.
Putin’s presence in Delhi reinforces the importance of that relationship.
But the Russia relationship cannot be viewed exactly as it was before the Ukraine war.
Moscow’s increasing dependence on China has altered the strategic environment. Russia’s confrontation with the West has also made its economic and technological choices more complicated for India.
For New Delhi, the objective is therefore not to preserve an old-style India-Russia relationship unchanged. It is to preserve strategic value in the relationship while adjusting to a different international balance.
BRICS gives India one more place to do that.
Iran makes the summit harder
If China presents India with a long-term strategic challenge, Iran presents an immediate diplomatic one.
Iran is now a BRICS member, while the United Arab Emirates is also part of the expanded grouping. The ongoing war involving Iran has created tensions between members that cannot easily be hidden behind the language of Global South solidarity.
Reuters has reported that the conflict has strained relations between Iran and the UAE and complicated efforts to produce a joint BRICS declaration. The war has also disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, with direct implications for global energy markets.
For India, this is particularly sensitive.
India has longstanding relations with Iran and important economic and connectivity interests there. At the same time, the UAE has become an increasingly important economic and strategic partner for India.
New Delhi therefore has a practical reason to avoid turning BRICS into a forum where members are forced into rigid camps over West Asian conflicts.
India’s likely preference is a language that supports dialogue, stability, sovereignty and international law without converting the summit into a confrontation with the United States or its allies.
That may sound diplomatic. But in an expanded BRICS, diplomacy is the only way such differences can be managed.
The West cannot simply be left outside the equation
One of the easiest ways to misunderstand India’s BRICS policy is to describe it as a choice between BRICS and the West.
India’s economic and strategic relationships with the United States and Europe are too important for that interpretation to make sense.
India’s trade, technology partnerships, investment flows, defence cooperation and growing links with Western economies create a powerful incentive for New Delhi to avoid an ideological confrontation.
This is also why India has generally been cautious about proposals that could make BRICS appear to be an anti-American or anti-Western alliance.
The debate over de-dollarisation illustrates the problem.
Several BRICS countries support greater use of local currencies and alternative payment arrangements. But creating a genuinely integrated alternative to the dollar-based financial system is a much more difficult task than announcing the objective.
The expanded membership itself makes monetary coordination harder because the countries have very different financial systems, currencies and economic priorities.
India may support diversification. That does not necessarily mean it wants to dismantle the dollar-based system.
There is an important distinction between reducing vulnerability and declaring war on an existing financial order.
BRICS needs to prove that it can deliver
This may ultimately be the most important test of the Delhi summit.
BRICS has become a significant diplomatic forum. But influence is not measured only by the number of leaders attending a summit or the percentage of global GDP represented by its members.
The question is whether the grouping can produce mechanisms that improve trade, investment, technology cooperation, financial connectivity and supply-chain resilience.
India’s 2026 chairship has already placed emphasis on resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. Proposals under discussion include a BRICS incubator network, a startup innovation fund and a logistics and supply-chain cooperation framework.
These initiatives may sound less dramatic than debates about a new global currency or a new world order.
They may also prove more important.
A startup fund, better logistics coordination or more resilient supply chains can produce measurable benefits. A political declaration about creating a new global financial system is much harder to translate into reality.
For India, the practical agenda may therefore be more valuable than the rhetoric.
Can India actually balance all sides?
India’s answer is unlikely to be a simple yes.
There is no permanent balance in international politics. The relative importance of China, Russia, the United States, Europe and West Asia changes with circumstances.
What India can maintain is strategic flexibility.
That means cooperating with China without ignoring the border problem. Maintaining the Russia relationship without becoming trapped in Russia’s confrontation with the West. Engaging Iran without damaging ties with Gulf partners. And expanding relations with the United States and Europe without allowing those partnerships to define every Indian foreign-policy decision.
BRICS can support that strategy because it gives India another diplomatic platform.
But it can also complicate it if the grouping becomes increasingly defined by opposition to the West.
That is the line New Delhi will have to walk in Delhi.
Modi-Xi talks may matter more than the final declaration
The formal BRICS declaration will attract considerable attention. But India’s longer-term interests may be better served by what happens around the summit table.
A Modi-Xi meeting could help consolidate the cautious improvement in India-China relations and create space for discussions on trade, investment, border management and economic engagement. Indian reporting has identified several of these issues as potential areas of discussion.
The significance of such a meeting should not be overstated.
A meeting does not mean that the strategic competition between India and China has ended. Nor does improved dialogue automatically resolve the border dispute or trade imbalance.
But diplomacy works through sustained communication.
If India and China can manage competition without allowing every disagreement to derail engagement, BRICS becomes more useful to both.
The real opportunity for India
India’s greatest advantage at BRICS 2026 may not be its ability to dominate the organization.
It is its ability to connect different parts of the international system.
India has working relationships with Russia and Iran. It is a member of the Quad and has deepening ties with the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia. It is also trying to strengthen its role among developing countries and the wider Global South.
Few major economies occupy exactly that position.
That gives New Delhi diplomatic room that many other BRICS members do not have.
But diplomatic room has value only if it is used carefully.
India will need to resist the temptation to turn the summit into a demonstration of geopolitical symbolism. The more useful objective is to make BRICS more effective without allowing it to become a vehicle for someone else’s strategic agenda.
What BRICS 2026 will really test
The Delhi summit comes at a moment when the international system is becoming more fragmented.
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, US-China rivalry, changing trade patterns and pressure on existing multilateral institutions are all forcing middle and emerging powers to rethink how they operate.
BRICS is one expression of that change.
But an expanded BRICS faces a basic question: can countries with very different interests cooperate without pretending that they agree on everything?
India’s answer to that question could shape the character of the organization for years.
New Delhi does not need BRICS to become an alternative to the West. Nor does it need to turn it into a China-led platform. Its interest is in a stronger, more representative and more practical institution in which India has enough room to pursue its own interests.
That is why India’s real balancing act in BRICS 2026 is not between four countries or four geopolitical camps.
It is between cooperation and dependence, strategic autonomy and strategic alignment, symbolism and results.
If India can keep that balance, the Delhi summit could strengthen both BRICS and India’s position in the emerging international order. If it cannot, the summit may demonstrate a familiar problem with large geopolitical groupings: considerable collective weight, but too little common ground to use it effectively.