Art 2. Vol 4. 2026
On 12 September, at Bharat Mandapam, leaders of the eleven-nation BRICS grouping unanimously adopted the New Delhi Declaration, a 140-paragraph text that took India’s negotiators through an all-night drafting session to close. Getting Russia, China, Iran and the UAE into the same paragraph as Brazil, Egypt and Indonesia, at a moment when a war in West Asia had already wrecked one BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting earlier in the year, is a genuine feat of chairmanship. PM Modi’s government has every reason to present the summit as vindication of India’s claim to convening power: host thirty cities’ worth of ministerial and expert meetings over a year, keep a bloc that spans nuclear rivals and active belligerents from fracturing in public, and walk away with a consensus document. That headline is fair. It is also not the most interesting thing that happened in New Delhi.
The more useful story about this BRICS summit is the same one that has been building for several cycles now: the collective declaration is increasingly a formality wrapped around the summit’s real business, which is bilateral. States no longer treat these gatherings chiefly as ideological projects to be advanced together. They treat them as calendar space, a rare and low-cost occasion when leaders who would struggle to justify a dedicated state visit can sit across a table from each other under a shared, deniable manner. The declaration is the receipt. The meetings on its sidelines are the transaction.
The bilateral summit inside the multilateral one
Consider what actually drew attention this year. Xi Jinping’s arrival in New Delhi on 12 September was his first visit to India in nearly seven years, and Chinese officials themselves noted that this made three consecutive years of Modi-Xi meetings, following Kazan in 2024 and Tianjin in 2025. The two leaders used the sidelines to reaffirm their commitment to resolving the boundary dispute and to discuss expanding trade and investment, continuing a thaw that began not at a bilateral summit but on the margins of the 2024 BRICS gathering in Kazan, itself made possible by an October 2024 patrolling agreement along the Line of Actual Control that ended the four-year Galwan-era standoff. None of this required BRICS to function as an institution. It required BRICS to function as a venue.
The same logic produced the summit’s other notable encounter: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s meeting with Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, the first known face-to-face contact between Iranian and Emirati leadership since the West Asia war began on 28 February. The UAE had suspended trade and financial transactions with Tehran after the conflict widened into direct strikes on Emirati territory, and the two governments could hardly have arranged a standalone summit without inviting weeks of speculation and domestic backlash in both capitals. A ten-minute conversation on the margins of a multilateral gathering carried none of that cost. As one Indian analyst put it to the press, it is simply easier to meet under a multilateral framework than to arrange any kind of dedicated bilateral visit.
This is the pattern C. Raja Mohan has been tracking across several of these summits: multilateral forums that were once sold as vehicles for collective positions against a shared external order — the West, the dollar, the old Bretton Woods architecture — now do more useful work as scheduling infrastructure for the states inside them. It is not that the collective agenda has disappeared. It is that fewer capitals believe the collective agenda is where the real returns lie, and more of them show up chiefly to get their own bilateral business done under cover of the family photo.
Resisting the anti-Western frame
The tension inside this year’s drafting process ran along a familiar line. Russia, China and Iran pushed for sharper language on unilateral sanctions and a bigger push toward de-dollarised trade; Tehran in particular wanted the declaration to go further on reducing dependence on the dollar and building alternative payment rails within the bloc. India resisted, unwilling to let the grouping drift into an explicitly anti-Western posture, not least with Washington having spent the past year threatening BRICS members with tariffs over what it called the bloc’s “anti-American” drift.
The compromise shows up plainly in what the declaration does not do. It does not endorse a common BRICS currency. What it backs instead is deeper cooperation on cross-border payment interoperability and greater use of national currencies in trade and investment — a technical, incremental step that lets India expand rupee settlement without picking a fight with the dollar’s reserve status. That distinction is not cosmetic. A shared currency would have been a structural challenge to the existing financial order; better plumbing for existing currencies is a service improvement. India got to have both a Global South talking point and a text that Washington cannot easily caricature as a currency bloc in the making.
The summit’s own branding reinforces the point. India chose “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” as its chairship theme, a phrase built almost entirely out of process nouns. There is no adversary named in it, no civilisational claim, nothing that reads as a rejoinder to anyone. That flatness is deliberate. It lets the declaration carry the Global South’s genuine financial grievances — quota reform at the IMF, a bigger voice in the rules for emerging technologies, the WTO’s continuing paralysis — without ever staging them as a confrontation with the West. Whether that balancing act survives the next round of expansion, or the next US administration’s patience with it, is a separate question. For now, it is the balancing act India chose, and it is the reason this BRICS text reads so differently from what Moscow or Tehran would have written alone.
What the declaration actually commits to on terrorism
Set against that financial hedging, the declaration’s language on terrorism is unambiguous, and it is where India extracted its clearest political win. The text condemns the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, which killed twenty-six people, “in the strongest terms,” and goes on to condemn all terrorism as “criminal and unjustifiable… regardless of motivation, whenever, wherever and by whomsoever committed.” It calls for zero tolerance and no double standards, commits members to fighting cross-border terrorism, terror financing and safe havens, and insists that terrorism carries no religious, national or civilisational identity. Getting that formulation past a bloc that includes states with their own reasons to hedge on cross-border militancy is not a small thing, and it follows a year of BRICS ministerial statements that had already condemned Pahalgam in similar terms.
It is worth being precise about what this language does and does not do. It names no perpetrator and no state. It is boilerplate in the specific sense that every member can sign it without conceding anything about their own conduct or their clients’ conduct elsewhere. The declaration’s counter-terrorism paragraphs are a rhetorical achievement for India’s diplomacy, not an operational one; they do not by themselves produce an extradition, a sanctions listing or a change in any government’s actual posture toward the groups operating from its territory. The gap between a shared adjective and a shared enforcement mechanism is exactly where BRICS declarations have always struggled, and this one is no exception.
The real story of the summit
None of this diminishes what India pulled off logistically and diplomatically. Chairing a bloc this heterogeneous, at a moment when its own members are fighting each other’s wars by proxy, and walking away with a single adopted text is not a trivial outcome. But the declaration itself is not where the summit’s significance lies. The significance lies in what the sidelines revealed about what a gathering like this is now for: a stage where China and India can quietly manage a border dispute, where Iran and the UAE can test the temperature of a relationship neither side is ready to restore in public, and where India can keep the Global South’s economic grievances alive without letting them curdle into an anti-Western project it has no interest in leading.
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