Summary
The 18th BRICS Summit will be held in New Delhi on September 12-13, 2026, giving India its second chairship since founding the grouping's reform agenda in 2012. BRICS has expanded from five to eleven members with the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia, alongside ten partner countries and this expansion has introduced bilateral disputes India and Brazil once feared would fracture the group's consensus principle, as happened with SAARC.
China has increasingly pushed BRICS toward an anti-Western posture and used it as one vehicle among several - alongside the AIIB, Belt and Road Initiative and the newly launched mBridge cross-border payment system - to build parallel structures challenging Bretton Woods institutions.
India's chairship theme this year rests on four pillars: Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability and revives Prime Minister Modi's 2018 "reformed multilateralism" vision.
WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
India's 2026 chairship falls at the exact moment BRICS' expanded membership and China's parallel-institution ambitions are pulling the group in directions India did not originally intend - making this summit a genuine test of whether India can still shape an organisation it helped found or whether its founding vision has already been outpaced by the coalition's own growth.
Standard News
India's BRICS Chairship Is a Course Correction, Not a Victory Lap
It would be easy to read India hosting the 18th BRICS Summit as a celebration - the founding reformer, back at the head of the table, presiding over a grouping that has grown from five members to eleven. That reading misses what is actually happening. India isn't chairing a triumph. It's chairing an intervention.
The Distance Between 2012 and 2026 When
India first chaired BRICS in 2012, the group's purpose was relatively settled: amplify emerging economies' voice in global governance, push reform of Western-dominated institutions like the IMF and World Bank and do it through consensus.
That purpose has drifted. China increasingly treats BRICS as one vehicle among several - alongside the AIIB, the Belt and Road Initiative and now mBridge, its cross-border digital payment system - for building parallel structures that don't reform existing institutions so much as compete with them.
India, notably, opposed BRICS's membership expansion in the first place, worried exactly about what has since happened: new members bringing bilateral disputes that threaten the consensus principle holding the group together, the same dynamic that hollowed out SAARC.
The Actual Tension India Is Managing Here's the
mechanism worth understanding: India now has to defend an expansion it didn't want, from a member it helped keep out becoming disruptive within - while simultaneously resisting China's push to turn the same expanded coalition anti-Western, without alienating the very members whose votes and goodwill India needs to check China's influence.
This isn't a simple two-sided dispute. It's India needing the expanded membership to work well enough to outvote or outmaneuver China's drift, even though that expansion is also the thing straining the group's cohesion. Undermining the new members' legitimacy to prove India was right about expansion would be self-defeating; it would also hand China more room to define what BRICS becomes.
Why "Non-West" Is Doing Real Work Here
The distinction India insists on - "non-West" rather than "anti-West"
- isn't rhetorical hedging. It's a structural bet, that a majority of BRICS members want reform and multi-alignment, not confrontation with the West and that this majority can be organised around India's four-pillar chairship theme if India leads actively rather than defensively. The counterfactual is instructive: if BRICS becomes explicitly anti-Western, India's own strategic hedging - its Quad membership, its complicated but ongoing relationship with Washington - becomes untenable. India cannot afford BRICS to force that binary choice. For the exam, the sharpest reading of this summit isn't "India leads BRICS." It's that India is trying to prevent an institution it built from being repurposed by another founding member for a project India explicitly does not share - using its chairship's limited but real agenda-setting power to do it.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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BRICS originally comprised Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa; it now has 11 members and 10 partner countries after the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia.
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The New Development Bank (NDB) was established following India's first BRICS chairship in 2012.
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BRICS accounted for nearly 20% of world GDP in 2010.
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China has formally launched mBridge, a multi-central-bank digital currency platform for cross-border payments, alongside existing parallel structures like the AIIB and Belt and Road Initiative.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
The full argument for why India should press harder against China's parallel-institution strategy even at the cost of visible friction at the summit table - built as strongly as its actual proponents would build it.
The equally strong case for why India should prioritise expanded-coalition cohesion over confronting China directly and what that argument gets right that the confrontation case misses.
TAN's actual institutional position on which consideration should prevail at this summit and the specific reasoning behind that weighing - not a survey of both sides left unresolved.
The case study on how India's de-dollarisation stance (UPI-linking over mBridge) is already a working template for this exact non-West-not-anti-West balancing act.
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