India Is Hosting BRICS This Week. Its Real Bet Should Still Be the West.

Host the Summit. Don't Bet the Strategy on It.

India welcomes the world to New Delhi this week as chair of the 18th BRICS summit. That hosting role is real diplomatic work and it should be done well. But it should not be mistaken for India's strategic centre of gravity - because the numbers around this summit tell a story that the ceremony does not.

The Case for Looking West

1. The delivery record is thin. Over a decade, the New Development Bank has approved roughly $39-40 billion for all its members combined - a figure the World Bank alone committed in a single fiscal year (2025: $81 billion).

India put in real capital - $2 billion paid, $8 billion pledged - for a bank that lends at a fraction of the scale India actually needs. 2. The security payoff has not materialised. In 17 years of summits, BRICS partners have repeatedly voiced only "support" for India's "aspiration" to a greater UN role - never a firm commitment to India's Security Council candidature.

In September 2024, BRICS foreign ministers could not even agree a joint statement on this point. 3. The economic dependence runs the other way. The US takes a fifth of India's goods exports and over half its software exports and holds $390 billion of Indian securities.

China, by contrast, ran a record $112 billion trade surplus against India in 2025-26 and has previously restricted rare-earth magnet supplies to Indian manufacturers - hardly the behaviour of a partner India should be structuring its diplomacy around.

The Honest Counter

The strongest reply is not that BRICS delivers spectacularly - it doesn't - but that it offers India something the West cannot: insurance. A platform among non-Western powers reduces India's exposure to any single relationship, gives it leverage in trade negotiations with Washington and lets it champion Global South concerns that Western-led institutions have historically ignored.

Intra-BRICS trade has grown roughly thirteen-fold since 2003. That is not nothing.

Where This Actually Lands

That insurance argument only works if the "other" side of the hedge is actually strengthening India's position. It isn't. Russia's per capita income barely moved in over a decade outside war spending. Brazil and South Africa's incomes have fallen by nearly a quarter.

China refuses to expand domestic consumption because its entire model depends on exporting the surplus - increasingly to India. Diversifying into a bloc whose largest members are either stagnating or actively running up India's deficit is not a hedge; it is trading one dependency for a worse one.

India should keep showing up, keep using the NDB and local-currency mechanisms where genuinely useful and keep the diplomatic door open. But the resources, attention and political capital that matter most this decade belong with the trade and technology relationships that are actually funding India's growth - and those sit in Washington and Brussels, not in a bloc built by a marketing acronym its own author has disowned.