Consider This: Can India Make BRICS+ Relevant?

India presides over the next BRICS Leaders’ Summit—the 18th BRICS Summit—which will be held in New Delhi, India, on 12–13 September 2026.

India’s hosting of the 2026 BRICS summit follows Brazil’s in 2025 and builds partly on the Rio de Janeiro summit’s emphasis on the Global South and a more people-centred agenda, but with distinctly Indian priorities. Brazil focused on sustainability, poverty reduction, health and civil-society participation. India has retained the emphasis on inclusion and people-to-people links, but is placing greater weight on economic growth, energy security, innovation and artificial intelligence (AI).

The shift reflects different national circumstances. Brazil approached poverty primarily through welfare and sustainability; fast-growing India is more likely to emphasise growth and development as the route to poverty reduction. Meanwhile, the US-Iran conflict has pushed energy security higher up the agenda, modifying the previous emphasis on clean energy transition.

India hopes to secure full attendance at this year’s summit, including China’s President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. (Unlike Brazil and South Africa, India is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court.¹) China’s level of engagement will be particularly important given the increasingly competitive India-China relationship. If Xi does attend, it would be his first visit to India since 2019.

Rather than new tension, Xi Jinping's delay in confirming attendance may reflect a broader pattern in which major powers sometimes postpone formal acceptance of multilateral summit invitations until closer to the event. A similar dynamic was observed ahead of the 2017 BRICS summit in Xiamen, when Narendra Modi delayed confirming his participation amid the Doklam² border standoff. With China set to host next year's summit—where quorum rules require every leader's attendance—Xi was generally considered unlikely to miss this year's meeting, given Beijing's longstanding support for the BRICS process and its interest in maintaining momentum ahead of its own host year.

BRICS +: Greater Representation, Less Cohesion

BRICS+ attracts Global South countries because it offers prestige, strategic flexibility and relatively few political or economic conditions. Unlike the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank or Western-led institutions, it does not impose governance requirements or interfere significantly in domestic affairs. Membership also provides closer access to major powers including China, India and Russia.

Expansion, however, was controversial. Brazil and India initially resisted it, fearing that enlargement would dilute cohesion and increase Chinese and Russian influence. Moscow and Beijing strongly supported expansion, partly to increase BRICS’ geopolitical weight and broaden participation from states more closely aligned with their interests.

The result is a grouping that is more representative but considerably less cohesive. The Iran-UAE conflict demonstrated the problem dramatically: BRICS+ includes countries actively fighting one another. New members also remain implicitly second tier, with the original five still dominating leadership and decision-making.

The current members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, the UAE, Iran, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

Saudi Arabia accepted the invitation but remains ambiguous, “considering” rather than “acceding”. It is a working member of BRICS+ for trade, payments, and energy-policy purposes, but it has not signed away any optionality with Washington.

There are also “partner countries”, confirmed in 2025: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Expansion has therefore increased BRICS’ international relevance while simultaneously weakening its ability to act collectively.

What Is BRICS For?

BRICS was originally conceived as a mechanism for reforming a Western-dominated international order. In 2009, members sought greater representation for emerging economies within institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

By 2026, however, the liberal international order itself became increasingly fragmented. BRICS members now use the organisation as one component of a broader strategy of “club shopping”: building a portfolio of memberships in multiple institutions, with activity levels higher or lower, according to whichever best advances their interests.

BRICS is neither a military alliance nor a coherent geopolitical bloc. Members frequently disagree and tend to cooperate selectively. India and Brazil largely retain the original reformist vision; Russia advocates a more explicitly multipolar system; and China has increasingly emphasized concepts such as multipolarity, development-led cooperation and reforms to existing international institutions. These competing visions prevent BRICS from articulating a convincing alternative international order.

Its strongest opportunity is therefore more practical: creating institutions and mechanisms through which Global South countries can cooperate outside traditional Western-dominated structures.

New Development Bank and BRICS Pay

BRICS has increasingly developed tangible institutions, notably the New Development Bank (NDB), Contingent Reserve Arrangement and BRICS Pay.

These are significant because they create networks of economic interdependence even where political consensus is weak. The NDB, originally promoted by China, provides infrastructure and industrial-development financing with fewer policy conditions than the IMF or World Bank. BRICS Pay similarly seeks to facilitate cross-border payments and greater use of national currencies.

These institutions officially describe themselves as complements rather than replacements for Bretton Woods institutions. In practice, however, they operate according to different principles: they are generally less transparent, more politically contingent and more closely connected to members’ strategic interests.

BRICS therefore increasingly challenges the existing system indirectly rather than reforming it directly. As more countries use these alternatives, the relative importance of Western-led institutions may gradually diminish.

Building Sovereign Payments Infrastructure

Many countries want to keep more transaction processing domestic, lowering fees, widening financial inclusion, and reducing dependence on foreign payment networks. BRICS is a good place to exchange knowledge and build alternatives to Western infrastructure.

CIPS (China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) had roughly 1,500 participating institutions by end-2025, up from about 1,300 two years earlier; daily volumes crossed $80 billion in late 2025. India’s UPI is now linked with the UAE, Singapore, Sri Lanka, France (for tourist payments), and Mauritius, with active negotiations for Saudi mada³ and Egypt’s Meeza⁴. Russia’s SPFS, designed as a SWIFT alternative, has roughly 600 participating institutions, the vast majority Russian or post-Soviet but with a slowly growing Iranian, Belarusian, and Chinese tail. None of these systems individually replaces SWIFT—but together, in combination, they provide enough redundancy that a sanctioned entity can keep transacting somewhere.

Donald Trump’s second presidency has had sharply different effects across BRICS.

For China and Russia, the US retreat from parts of the liberal international order has created strategic opportunity. The two countries, along with Iran, have stronger incentives to develop alternative financial arrangements that reduce vulnerability to sanctions and diversify away from reliance on the US dollar. For India and Brazil, however, Trump’s tariffs, diplomatic interventions and confrontational rhetoric have damaged relationships that had previously been relatively close.

Intra-BRICS merchandise trade has expanded more than 13-fold since 2003, with exports reaching US$1.17 trillion in 2024.⁵ But despite the rapid growth, intra-BRICS trade still only accounts for about 5% of world trade, which suggests significant, untapped potential. Intra-BRICS trade still accounts for only about 20%⁶ of South-South trade even though members hold over two-thirds of the Global South's GDP—so the group trades much less internally than its economic weight might suggest.

Trump has also repeatedly portrayed BRICS—particularly efforts to reduce reliance on the US dollar—as a potential challenge to US interests. Yet this interpretation exaggerates BRICS’ cohesion. BRICS Pay remains embryonic, US dollar alternatives remain limited, and members rarely coordinate strategically.

The Iran conflict reinforced this point. India, China and Russia each maintained separate relationships with Iran and sought to preserve energy flows, but there was no coordinated BRICS strategy or military support. Attempts by individual members to mediate also had little impact.

Trump’s pressure may therefore encourage greater cooperation, but it has not yet transformed BRICS into a coherent anti-American bloc.

Outlook: Between Global-South Platform and Irrelevance

The Iran conflict exposed BRICS’ central weakness: it cannot easily speak with one voice when members’ national interests diverge. The Foreign Ministers’ meeting failed to produce a joint statement, while individual members pursued their own arrangements with Iran and other regional actors.

An explicitly anti-Western BRICS+ remains unlikely. India and Brazil retain extensive relationships with Western democracies, while several Gulf members are close US security partners, the UAE being prominent among them. The group is therefore more likely to remain a platform for selective Global South coordination than become an alternative military or political alliance.

The best-case scenario is that BRICS+ develops practical institutions capable of delivering infrastructure, financing and international coordination, eventually becoming something resembling a modern Non-Aligned Movement:⁷ diverse but influential in shaping global governance.

The worst case is continued enlargement without greater cohesion. BRICS+ would then become little more than a forum for annual declarations—representative but ineffective, resembling a Global South version of the UN General Assembly.

Its future depends less on membership growth than on whether it can turn a handful of shared interests into concrete institutions and collective outcomes.