AI Generated Summary
- As leaders of some of the world’s most consequential emerging economies gather in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit, the meeting comes at a moment when the international order appears unusually unsettled.
- A state whose economy remains deeply connected with agriculture, food security, exports and an enormous overseas diaspora has a direct stake in the evolution of international trade and supply chains.
- For countries such as India, predictable rules are preferable to a world in which economic relations depend excessively on the political calculations of individual powers.
As leaders of some of the world’s most consequential emerging economies gather in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit, the meeting comes at a moment when the international order appears unusually unsettled. Two major wars continue to cast their shadow over global politics, old alliances are being tested, trade is increasingly being shaped by strategic considerations, and countries large and small are searching for ways to protect themselves from geopolitical uncertainty.
For India, therefore, hosting BRICS is about considerably more than diplomatic ceremony. It offers New Delhi an opportunity to demonstrate something that has increasingly defined its foreign policy: the ability to maintain relationships across competing centres of global power without surrendering its strategic autonomy.
The presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping gives the summit particular significance. Yet another leader, though absent from the gathering, is likely to loom over many of its conversations — US President Donald Trump.
The unpredictability of Washington’s foreign policy has become a concern not merely for its competitors but also for some of America’s longstanding partners. Recent strains in US relations with traditional allies have reinforced a wider anxiety: if even established partnerships can be subjected to sudden pressure, governments elsewhere have greater reason to diversify their diplomatic and economic options.
This is precisely where BRICS assumes importance.
India has no interest in turning BRICS into an anti-American platform. Its relationship with the United States remains central to its economic, technological and strategic calculations. At the same time, strategic autonomy requires India to ensure that no single relationship becomes indispensable enough to restrict its choices.
BRICS provides one such additional layer of strategic insurance.
The summit’s economic agenda reflects this changing world. Trade security, energy supplies, resilient supply chains, digital infrastructure, agriculture, logistics and labour mobility are no longer merely economic questions. The disruptions of recent years have demonstrated that access to energy, technology, food, finance and critical goods can quickly become instruments of geopolitical leverage.
For Punjab, these discussions should not appear remote.
A state whose economy remains deeply connected with agriculture, food security, exports and an enormous overseas diaspora has a direct stake in the evolution of international trade and supply chains. Decisions taken in distant capitals eventually reach Punjab’s farms, factories and households through fertiliser and energy prices, export opportunities, agricultural markets, migration and remittance flows.
That makes India’s emphasis on a stable and rules-based international trading system particularly relevant. BRICS members are expected to reiterate their support for strengthening multilateral trade and keeping the World Trade Organisation at the centre of the global trading architecture. Such language may sound procedural, but its importance has grown as tariffs, sanctions and economic restrictions increasingly become instruments of statecraft.
For countries such as India, predictable rules are preferable to a world in which economic relations depend excessively on the political calculations of individual powers.
The arrival of Xi Jinping in India after a long gap will inevitably attract considerable attention. India-China relations remain burdened by serious strategic differences, particularly along the border, and a BRICS summit cannot erase those realities. Nor should participation in the same multilateral forum be mistaken for convergence between New Delhi and Beijing.
But diplomacy does not require agreement on everything. It requires mechanisms through which competing powers can manage disagreements while identifying areas where cooperation remains possible.
The same principle applies to India’s relationship with Russia. Moscow remains an important strategic partner even as India’s engagement with the United States and Europe has expanded substantially. India’s ability to speak with Washington, Moscow, Beijing, the Gulf states and the wider Global South is sometimes portrayed as diplomatic ambiguity. In reality, in an increasingly multipolar world, it can become a source of leverage.
Images of Narendra Modi alongside Xi and Putin inevitably attract international attention because they symbolise precisely this possibility: India cannot easily be placed inside somebody else’s geopolitical camp.
That does not mean equidistance. India will cooperate more closely with different countries on different questions depending upon its interests. It can deepen defence and technology ties with the United States, maintain its longstanding relationship with Russia, compete with China while continuing dialogue with Beijing, and simultaneously strengthen its partnerships across West Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia.
This flexibility is increasingly valuable.
BRICS itself has also changed considerably from the grouping represented by its original five-member acronym. Its widening network now brings together countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America and West Asia with vastly different political systems, economic priorities and strategic interests. That diversity makes consensus difficult, but it also gives the grouping considerable geographical and political weight.
Its discussions today extend far beyond conventional diplomacy. Energy, health, agriculture, finance, education, science and technology, artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, climate action and space cooperation are all part of an expanding institutional architecture.
India’s chairmanship has sought to organise this agenda around resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. These priorities deserve attention because they address concerns increasingly shared across the developing world.
Resilience means ensuring that shocks — whether wars, pandemics, natural disasters or trade disruptions — do not cripple access to food, energy and essential goods. Innovation means ensuring that emerging economies are not merely consumers of technologies developed elsewhere but become centres of entrepreneurship, research, start-ups and digital infrastructure themselves. Cooperation involves pushing for reform of international institutions whose structures often reflect the balance of power of an earlier era. Sustainability requires developing economies to pursue growth without ignoring climate and energy realities.
India is particularly well positioned to shape these conversations.
It is large enough to influence the international system but still carries many of the developmental concerns shared by emerging economies. It has close relationships with Western powers while retaining credibility in much of the Global South. It is a major energy consumer, agricultural producer, technology market and increasingly an important manufacturing economy.
New Delhi should use that position carefully.
BRICS will succeed from India’s perspective not if it becomes another arena for rhetorical confrontation with the West, but if it evolves into a practical mechanism that expands India’s economic and diplomatic choices. Cooperation on payments, supply chains, energy security, technology, agricultural research and institutional reform would ultimately matter more than declarations designed primarily for political symbolism.
There is also a larger lesson in the summit.
The world emerging from the turbulence of the present decade is unlikely to resemble the relatively stable international order that followed the Cold War. Power is becoming more dispersed. Economic interdependence remains enormous, yet political trust is diminishing. Countries are simultaneously cooperating, competing and hedging against one another.
India’s answer to this uncertainty should neither be isolation nor alignment with a single bloc.
It should be multiplication of options.
That is the real significance of the BRICS summit in New Delhi. Every additional partnership gives India greater room to negotiate with the others. Stronger engagement with BRICS need not come at the expense of Washington; stronger ties with Washington need not require abandoning Moscow; dialogue with Beijing need not mean overlooking India’s security concerns.
In an unpredictable world, strategic autonomy is no longer simply an old doctrine of Indian foreign policy. Properly exercised, it is an increasingly valuable national asset.
And New Delhi this weekend has an opportunity to put that principle on display.
