At the end of the BRICS summit in New Delhi, Narendra Modi warned that geopolitical tensions, disrupted supply chains and climate emergencies no longer remain confined to the countries in which they originate. Their consequences travel through energy prices, shipping routes, food systems and financial markets until they reach people who had no part in creating the crisis and possess the fewest resources with which to survive it. It was a familiar appeal for cooperation from the Global South, but Modi’s choice of language was more revealing than the ritual demand for solidarity. Technology and critical minerals, he warned, could be weaponised in ways that obstruct development. Security politics now runs through semiconductors, data, energy storage, telecommunications and the minerals required for the green transition. Development is no longer a separate, benevolent conversation conducted after the serious men have finished discussing war. It is one of the principal battlefields of strategic competition. This is where India wants BRICS to operate: not as an ideological coalition against the West, and certainly not as the civilian wing of a Chinese-led geopolitical axis, but as an instrument through which developing countries can acquire greater influence over the rules governing trade, technology, finance and international institutions. The distinction matters. BRICS now has eleven full members and represents approximately half of humanity, but population is not the same as power and expansion is not the same as cohesion. Its members include democracies and authoritarian states, energy exporters and importers, countries aligned with the United States and countries under American sanctions. Iran and the United Arab Emirates belong to the same organisation despite standing on opposite sides of an increasingly violent regional confrontation. China and India cooperate inside BRICS while remaining strategic competitors across Asia. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Masoud Pezeshkian could sit together in New Delhi and endorse a common declaration. This demonstrates diplomatic reach, but not geopolitical unity. The achievement of BRICS lies precisely in its ability to bring such governments into the same room. Its weakness lies in what they are prepared to do after leaving it. India understands both sides of this equation better than most. New Delhi wants a more representative international order, reform of the United Nations Security Council and greater influence for developing economies in the institutions created after the Second World War. It objects to Western states retaining privileges that no longer correspond to the distribution of global economic and demographic power. But India does not seek to replace Western dominance with Chinese dominance. It has no interest in exchanging one hierarchy for another, particularly one headed by the country confronting it along the Himalayan border, expanding its naval presence in the Indian Ocean and surrounding it with infrastructure projects of varying degrees of commercial innocence. This explains Modi’s insistence that BRICS is not anti-West and that the Global South should become a “rule-shaper.” The Indian project is revisionist, but not revolutionary. New Delhi wants the existing order altered sufficiently to accommodate India’s rise, not destroyed and replaced by an arrangement designed in Beijing. China sees BRICS differently. For Beijing, the organisation is part of a wider architecture through which it can reduce Western influence, internationalise its financial and technological systems and present Chinese leadership as the natural expression of the developing world. The expansion of BRICS strengthens that claim, especially when membership includes major energy producers and states excluded or sanctioned by the United States. Russia and Iran have still more immediate reasons to encourage this transformation. Both want alternatives to Western financial channels, sanctions regimes and political institutions in which Washington and its allies retain disproportionate leverage. Their enthusiasm for de-dollarisation and local-currency trade is driven not only by abstract concern for financial pluralism but by the practical inconvenience of being punished through the existing system. India shares the concern without sharing the strategic objective. It favours greater use of national currencies and more resilient payment mechanisms because dependence creates vulnerability. It does not, however, intend to turn economic diversification into allegiance to an anti-American monetary crusade. India’s relations with the United States, Europe and Japan remain central to its investment, technology and security strategy. Strategic autonomy requires multiple options, not the ceremonial substitution of one dependency for another. Modi’s warning about the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals should be read within this context. It can be applied to Western restrictions on advanced technology, export controls and sanctions. It can equally be applied to China’s dominance over the processing of rare earths and several supply chains essential to renewable energy, electronics and defence production. The warning was therefore addressed to the international system and, rather tactfully, to some of the leaders sitting in the room. China’s proposal to lead an open-source artificial-intelligence ecosystem for BRICS illustrates the opportunity and the problem. Shared technological platforms could give developing countries access to tools otherwise controlled by a handful of Western corporations. But a digital ecosystem organised around Chinese standards, infrastructure and expertise may simply relocate dependence. Sovereignty is not greatly improved when the nationality of the gatekeeper changes. India’s answer is diversification. Resilient supply chains, in New Delhi’s understanding, must allow countries to avoid being trapped by any single supplier, transit route, payment system or technological platform. The language overlaps with Western “de-risking” from China, but India extends the principle to Western pressure as well. It wants American technology, Russian energy, Gulf capital, access to Chinese markets where possible and sufficient domestic capacity to prevent any of them from becoming indispensable. BRICS provides a useful arena for this strategy because its diversity prevents any member from easily imposing complete alignment. The same divisions that make the bloc appear incoherent also give India room to manoeuvre. A tightly integrated anti-Western alliance dominated by China would be strategically uncomfortable for New Delhi. A loose but influential forum capable of bargaining for institutional reform, development finance and technological access is far more useful. The New Delhi Declaration reflected this balancing act. It criticised unilateral sanctions and trade restrictions, called for reform of global institutions and supported increased trade in local currencies and improved cross-border payment systems. It also addressed conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan through language broad enough to secure agreement among states whose policies diverge sharply. Achieving consensus required diplomatic skill; it did not abolish the differences that made the consensus difficult. This is not necessarily a failure. BRICS was never NATO with a development bank attached. Its members are not bound by a collective-security treaty, a shared political system or a single strategic adversary. Its value lies in coordinating countries that agree that the international order is inequitable even when they disagree over what should replace it. The danger is that this minimum consensus can become an industry of declarations. Summits produce statements on multipolarity, development, climate finance, institutional reform and South-South cooperation with impressive regularity. The language grows more ambitious while implementation proceeds at the stately pace traditionally favoured by multilateral organisations. Modi’s demand that decisions be converted into time-bound results was therefore more than administrative housekeeping. It addressed the central credibility problem of the expanded BRICS. An organisation representing half the world’s population cannot measure success by the number of paragraphs in its final declaration. The agreement to create an integrated early-warning system for infectious diseases offers one practical test. The pandemic demonstrated that health emergencies cross borders more efficiently than diplomatic cooperation, while developing countries remain vulnerable to delayed information, unequal access to vaccines and dependence on external pharmaceutical supply chains. BRICS members agreed to establish a dedicated mechanism to improve surveillance, information-sharing and rapid response. If implemented, it would provide a visible public good rather than another theory of multipolarity. The New Delhi Declaration also set out cooperation on public health, resilient supply chains, critical minerals, energy storage and digital infrastructure. Other Indian proposals—including a logistics and supply-chain framework, cooperation on agro-ecology and energy storage, and a startup innovation fund—follow the same logic. They shift attention from the grand contest between “the West” and “the rest” towards the mechanisms through which developing countries might increase capacity and reduce vulnerability. That shift suits India. China can compete with the United States for systemic leadership; Russia can declare the decline of Western hegemony; Iran can use BRICS to demonstrate that isolation has failed. India has a different interest. It wants the Global South to possess greater leverage without becoming the geopolitical infantry of somebody else’s confrontation. New Delhi can credibly make that argument because it belongs to several diplomatic worlds at once. It is a member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a participant in the Quad, a major partner of the United States, a longstanding defence partner of Russia and an increasingly important actor in the Middle East. Western commentators often interpret this as indecision or opportunism. India calls it strategic autonomy, and the difference depends largely upon whether one expects foreign policy to serve alliances or national interests. The expanded BRICS amplifies India’s voice, but it also increases the difficulty of preserving this balance. As China’s economic weight grows within the group and sanctioned states push it towards a more explicit anti-Western identity, New Delhi will have to prevent institutional reform from becoming bloc politics. At the same time, it must show developing countries that its caution does not amount to defending the status quo from which India itself has benefited more than many poorer states. This is why practical initiatives matter. India cannot outspend China across the Global South, nor can it offer Russian energy or Gulf capital. It can, however, shape BRICS around issues on which a diverse membership can cooperate: public health, disaster preparedness, food security, digital public infrastructure, resilient supply chains and access to technology. These programmes sound less dramatic than replacing the dollar. They also have a better chance of improving anyone’s life. The New Delhi summit demonstrated that BRICS can still produce agreement despite wars, sanctions and rivalries among its members. It did not demonstrate that the group has become a unified geopolitical force, because it has not. The contradiction is not incidental; it is the defining condition of the organisation. For China, that condition is an obstacle to leadership. For India, it may be an advantage. A BRICS too divided to become an alliance but large enough to influence global negotiations offers New Delhi exactly the kind of platform it prefers: one that challenges Western privilege, restrains Chinese dominance and leaves India free to cooperate with both.

The summit’s declarations will now pass into the less photogenic phase of committees, financing and implementation. Modi was right to insist upon deadlines. BRICS has already proved that it can expand, issue communiqués and assemble leaders who disagree about almost everything. The next test is whether it can produce something more tangible than a group photograph of the emerging multipolar world.