When "Non-Western" Risks Becoming "Anti-Western"

BRICS's Real Test Isn't the Communiqué

The Optics And The Substance

Eleven leaders at Bharat Mandapam, half the world's population represented in one room and a lineup - Putin, Xi, Pezeshkian, Ramaphosa, Prabowo - that would have been unthinkable for a single grouping a decade ago. It is tempting to read this summit the way every summit gets read: will the joint statement survive overnight drafting, will Modi and Xi's meeting signal a thaw, will the language on Ukraine or Gaza satisfy anyone.

None of that is actually the test. The real question is narrower and harder: can India keep a bloc this internally divided functional without letting it curdle into something it was never meant to be - an anti-Western axis?

Why The Temptation Exists

The pull toward a harder line is real, not manufactured. Washington has spent the last year and a half weaponising tariffs and now threatens more tariffs specifically against countries pushing intra-BRICS trade in local currencies.

For Russia and Iran, both under Western sanctions, de-dollarisation is not an abstraction - it is survival. China has pushed hardest for BRICS expansion precisely because a larger, more assertive bloc gives it more room to challenge a dollar-centred financial order it did not design.

Seen from Beijing or Moscow, hesitating to confront the West looks like squandering exactly the leverage this expanded membership was built to create.

Why India Resists It Anyway But

India's calculation is different and for good reason. Equidistance is not the same as powerlessness - it is how Delhi keeps its options open with Washington on defence and technology, with Moscow on energy and with Beijing on trade, all at once.

A BRICS that hardens into an anti-Western bloc doesn't liberate India; it forces a binary choice India has spent decades refusing to make. It also runs into a harder problem: a bloc that seats Iran beside the UAE cannot manufacture ideological unity even if it tried, because their interests are genuinely, not performatively, opposed.

Chasing anti-Western coherence would fracture the very membership that gives BRICS its size.

Where This Actually Lands

The institutional case for India is to keep BRICS "non-Western" without letting it drift "anti-Western"

• not by avoiding hard choices, but by making the platform useful enough that neither label sticks. Concrete deliverables matter more than rhetoric here: a payment-interoperability protocol built on UPI's existing Gulf and Southeast Asian footprint and governance reform at the New Development Bank that gives newer members real capital weight. Both let members reduce dependence on any single financial system without requiring anyone to declare an enemy. The honest cost of this approach is that it can look like drift or worse, indecision. It is neither - it is India betting that more choices, sustained patiently, beat one more bloc.