BRICS: Too Big To Ignore, Too Divided To Rule
· Free Press Journal
On September 12-13, New Delhi will host the 18th BRICS Summit, bringing together the expanded grouping of 11 members and 10 partner countries. India, which assumed the BRICS chair for the fourth time this year, has chosen an unusually hopeful theme for an increasingly complicated grouping: “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”, reflecting a people-centric approach rooted in “Humanity First”.
But behind that uplifting language lies a harder question: can a group this big still act as one?
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BRICS is certainly no longer the small club of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. With Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia joining, it now carries enormous demographic and economic weight; for instance, the intra-BRICS merchandise trade crossed $1.17 trillion in 2024, more than thirteen times its 2003 level.
Yet there is an intriguing paradox: BRICS has become bigger faster than it has become deeper.
Its members do not share a common worldview. India and China remain strategic competitors. Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have their own complex rivalries. Several BRICS members have deep security and economic relationships with the United States. Some see BRICS as a vehicle to challenge Western dominance; others see it primarily as a platform for greater voice and strategic autonomy.
And perhaps that is precisely why BRICS matters.
BRICS does not have to replace the West to weaken its monopoly. It only has to make the West less indispensable.
Consider the dollar. The popular version of the BRICS story is dramatic: a new common currency will dethrone the dollar. That is neither imminent nor necessary. India itself is pushing something more practical: greater interoperability among digital payment systems to make cross-border transactions faster and easier. The objective, New Delhi insists, is not to replace the dollar but to create more efficient alternatives.
That distinction is crucial. The future may not be about abandoning the dollar. It may be about not needing it for everything.
The same logic applies beyond finance: development lending, trade, technology, supply chains and global governance. Countries increasingly want more choices, not necessarily a new master.
But here lies BRICS’ biggest internal challenge – and India’s biggest strategic opportunity.
China is the grouping’s economic centre of gravity. Its economic links with fellow BRICS members are far deeper than those of most other members, giving Beijing considerable influence over what the grouping could become.
India therefore faces a delicate balancing act: make BRICS stronger without making it China-centric; make it non-Western without making it anti-Western.
That is where India’s approach to BRICS becomes particularly significant. New Delhi has little interest in choosing between Washington and Beijing. India can be in BRICS and the QUAD, deepen its partnership with the US while retaining ties with Russia, and engage China where interests converge while competing where they do not.
This is not diplomatic indecision. It is strategic autonomy in practice.
The irony is that BRICS’ greatest strength may also be its greatest weakness. Its diversity makes decisive collective action difficult. But that same diversity gives it something a tightly aligned bloc cannot easily offer: a platform where countries that disagree with one another can still cooperate where their interests overlap.
The test for India, therefore, is not whether BRICS can become a “new G7”. Nor is it whether it can defeat the West. It is whether 11 countries with very different interests can turn their enormous collective weight into something useful.
India’s chairship theme – resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability – will ultimately be judged not by the elegance of the words, but by whether they produce practical cooperation in trade, finance, technology, development and global governance. India has already held more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements across over 25 Indian cities during its chairship, signalling an attempt to make BRICS more development-oriented and practical.
For India, then, the ambition should be simple: make BRICS a more useful club, not merely a louder one. Because the emerging world order may not be one in which one power replaces another. It may be one in which countries finally have more choices.
Piyush Kr. Sinha
Research Scholar with the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.