Seventeen years after the group first met, it’s a completely different animal. So, for that matter, is India. India takes the BRICS chair in 2026 and hosts the bloc’s 18th summit.
A Club That Doesn’t Quite Agree On Anything Which is why BRICS, for India, was never about picking a side. It’s closer to a toolbox. Grab what’s useful, skip the rest, and move on.
Now it’s chairing the very bloc it helped build. That’s the real story here – not the summit agenda, not the four buzzwords. A country that used to be the subject of other people’s forecasts is now writing a fair few of them itself.
Go back to 2001 and India was just one name on a list an economist thought might matter someday. And for what it’s worth, New Delhi keeps insisting the goal isn’t ideological – just a bigger voice for the Global South and institutions that look like 2026, not 1945.
BRICS voted to expand – and it wasn’t a token gesture. Overnight, more or less, a five-country club turned into something sprawling across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with serious oil producers and massive new markets sitting at the table. New Delhi’s chairship theme comes down to four words: resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability. Nice words. The harder part, officials admit, is making sure this round produces something beyond another joint statement nobody reads twice. One thing worth clearing up: BRICS was never India’s replacement for the US, Europe, the Quad or the G20. New Delhi runs all of them side by side – doesn’t pick, doesn’t have to. That’s the entire idea behind what Indian officials like to call strategic autonomy. BRICS gets India in a room with China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa. The Quad links it to the US, Japan and Australia. The G20 bridges rich and developing economies. Layered on top: separate, deepening relationships with the US, the EU, Japan and the Gulf states – running in parallel, not in competition.
Johannesburg, 2023, is the real hinge point. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE joined in 2024. Indonesia came aboard in 2025.
