GeoPrism

As eleven BRICS economies adopted the New Delhi Declaration this week, India’s chairship offered a test case for a diplomatic model built less on picking sides than on refusing to be reduced to one.

Xi Jinping shook Narendra Modi’s hand outside Bharat Mandapam on September 12, his first visit to India since 2019; Vladimir Putin arrived for his first in-person BRICS summit outside Russia since the war in Ukraine began¹. The image will circulate as shorthand for an anti-Western axis. It misreads what happened. The more interesting story isn’t that Modi hosted Xi and Putin. It’s that he hosted them the same week Washington and Brussels remained, by trade volume, among India’s largest partners, and neither fact cancelled out the other.

That simultaneity is the argument here. Modi’s most consequential diplomatic achievement isn’t an anti-Western bloc; BRICS has never become one, and its own May 2026 foreign ministers’ meeting collapsed without a joint statement over splits on West Asia². It is India’s accumulating capacity to sit inside overlapping, often mutually suspicious systems at once: BRICS and the Quad, Moscow and Washington, Beijing and the Gulf, without treating any one membership as exclusive. Call it managed multi-alignment. It isn’t new to 2026, but the New Delhi summit, and the 140-paragraph declaration it produced, show it operating at a scale and under a strain earlier chairships never faced.

Figure 1. Note: an illustrative schematic, not a ranked or scored index; line style marks the type of tie, not its strength. Compiled from groupings discussed in this article.

Start with the numbers, because BRICS diplomacy increasingly rests on them. The eleven-member grouping now accounts for roughly half the world’s population and forty percent of global GDP at purchasing power parity, against twenty-six percent of global trade³. The G7, by contrast, holds under thirty percent of PPP output, though it still commands something closer to forty-five percent in nominal dollar terms⁴. That gap between PPP and nominal weight isn’t a technicality. It is the entire argument for why BRICS matters economically while remaining, in hard-currency and financial-market terms, still the junior partner.

Figure 2. Source: BRICS 2026 presidency (brics2026.gov.in); Business Today, September 11, 2026; EBC Financial Group, February 9, 2026. Saudi Arabia is listed as a member by successive BRICS presidencies, but Riyadh has not publicly confirmed formal accession.

India’s own numbers carry a similar tension the government hasn’t always acknowledged cleanly. In May 2025, NITI Aayog announced India had become the world’s fourth-largest economy; the IMF’s April 2026 Outlook instead placed it sixth, behind Japan and the UK, the rupee’s slide from roughly 85 to 92 per dollar having done more to the ranking than any change in output⁵. Measured in purchasing power, India remains third, behind only the US and China. Nominal GDP has grown by something like ninety percent since 2014, a genuinely rapid expansion, though not the tidy “doubling” figure the ruling party’s own social accounts prefer.

Nowhere is the multi-alignment thesis tested harder than with China. Five years after Galwan, the relationship runs on what might fairly be called managed strategic competition: real cooperation where interests align, sustained wariness where they don’t, with neither side pretending the two can be resolved into friendship. The October 2024 patrolling agreement, Modi’s first visit to China in seven years for the Tianjin SCO summit, and the resumption of direct flights in late October 2025 all point one direction⁶. Xi’s own language in Tianjin, urging the “dragon and the elephant” to “dance together,” was striking; Modi, for his part, told Xi that India and China are “partners, not rivals”⁷.

Yet China overtook the US as India’s largest trading partner in FY2025-26, on the back of a $112 billion deficit built largely on electronics and machinery inputs India cannot yet substitute⁸. That is not the profile of a friendship. It is the profile of asymmetric interdependence that both governments have decided, for now, to manage rather than resolve. Skeptics are right that the pattern has cycled before, optimism followed by relapse, and nothing guarantees this iteration breaks the cycle⁹.

The American relationship shows a different kind of compartmentalization. Washington doubled tariffs on India to fifty percent in August 2025, explicitly over Russian oil purchases; Peter Navarro’s language, accusing India of complicity in “bloodshed,” was about as undiplomatic as trade policy gets between nominal partners¹⁰. Yet the two governments struck an interim deal in February 2026 cutting the rate to eighteen percent¹¹, even as technology cooperation under the renamed TRUST initiative, successor to iCET, kept advancing in semiconductors, AI and defence co-production through the same period of maximum trade friction¹².

Commerce and security, in other words, ran on separate tracks. India’s Russian crude purchases, meanwhile, dipped below a quarter of the import basket in early 2026 under sanctions pressure, then rebounded past fifty percent by June and July, Putin himself noting Russia was “expanding its exports” to India¹³. Whatever New Delhi promised Washington in February, it did not amount to abandoning Moscow. That is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over.

Figure 3. Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry (Government of India), as reported in Business Standard, April 15, 2026. Figures are two-way merchandise trade (exports plus imports), FY2025–26.

On the Global South, the more honest question is not whether India speaks for it. Everyone with a microphone claims to. It is whether India is building durable capacity to shape it. Its own Voice of Global South summits, deliberately excluding China, suggest an attempt to hold a convening role distinct from Beijing’s rival claim to developing-world leadership¹⁴. BRICS’s declaration backs India and Brazil for greater UN representation, but China, a BRICS member, remains the sole P5 power declining to explicitly endorse India’s Security Council candidacy in its separate P5 capacity, an unresolved contradiction the declaration’s language does not paper over so much as leave unaddressed¹⁵. Symbolic solidarity and institutional follow-through are not the same achievement, and the New Delhi Declaration mostly delivers the former.

The declaration itself rewards a “what actually changed” test more than a celebratory one. There is no common BRICS currency, and none is imminent; what exists is incremental growth in local-currency settlement and payment interoperability, alongside continued reliance on dollar-denominated bond markets even at the New Development Bank¹⁶.

The NDB’s own expansion is instructive: Uzbekistan completed accession in June 2026, while Colombia, announced as a member back in July 2025, still had not ratified by September 2026, and Iran’s claimed membership remains, per the bank’s own communications office, unconfirmed¹⁷. Institutions expand more slowly than communiqués suggest. Meanwhile Trump’s tariff threats against the bloc, one hundred percent in November 2024 over de-dollarisation, a further ten percent in July 2025 over “anti-American” alignment, never materialised as broad-based policy, which says as much about the limits of that threat as about BRICS’s cohesion¹⁸.

None of this adds up to India replacing the G7-led order with something else. It adds up to something narrower and, arguably, more durable: an India that has made itself hard to categorise, simultaneously a BRICS founder, a Quad partner, Russia’s largest oil customer outside sanctioned channels, and a country that just concluded, after two decades of negotiation, a free trade agreement with the EU that both sides called the “mother of all trade deals”¹⁹. The risk is real.

A country that belongs everywhere can end up decisive nowhere, and India’s UNSC campaign, nearly three decades old now, is the clearest evidence that a seat at every table doesn’t guarantee a permanent chair at the one that matters most. But the capacity to be read simultaneously as a Western partner, a BRICS member and a Global South leader, without any one audience concluding it has been abandoned, is not a trivial diplomatic asset. In a system fragmenting into overlapping networks rather than consolidating into rival blocs, that capacity to translate across them, more than any single summit outcome, is what New Delhi actually exported this week.

1. (Spokesman-Review 2026; NewsBricks 2026) ↩︎
2. (Forbes India 2026) ↩︎
3. (Vajiram & Ravi 2026; Forbes India 2026) ↩︎
4. (Chaturvedi 2025) ↩︎
5. (Business Standard 2026a; The Wire 2026) ↩︎
6. (Congressional Research Service 2025; ISPI 2026) ↩︎
7. (MFA China 2025) ↩︎
8. (Business Standard 2026b) ↩︎
9. (Foreign Policy 2025) ↩︎
10. (Al Jazeera 2025) ↩︎
11. (U.S. Embassy in India 2026) ↩︎
12. (CSIS 2026) ↩︎
13. (CNBC 2026; ThePrint 2026) ↩︎
14. (Tribune India 2024) ↩︎
15. (IMPRI 2026) ↩︎
16. (EBC 2026; Rio Times 2026) ↩︎
17. (Rio Times 2026) ↩︎
18. (Time 2025; PBS 2024) ↩︎
19. (ISAS 2026) ↩︎