Sep 11, 2026 13:41 pm IST

Opinion | BRICS Has Grown Up. Now It Must Behave Like An Adult

The India-China accommodation will be a key driver of the grouping, but a 'non-Western' agenda will work well only if it focuses on ending global conflict as much as on stabilising the global economy

Ajay Bisaria Ajay Bisaria Columnist

Ajay Bisaria Columnist

The India-China accommodation will be a key driver of the grouping, but a 'non-Western' agenda will work well only if it focuses on ending global conflict as much as on stabilising the global economy.The BRICS summit that India hosts this year is its fourth, with the fifth opportunity not coming for a decade. That alone should make us pause. This is a grouping that began life in 2001 as a clever acronym coined by a Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O'Neill, to sell emerging markets to investors. The summits followed from 2009. In its eighteenth year, the question worth asking is a simple one: is BRICS ready to grow up?

In some ways, it clearly is. What started as an investment thesis is now a premier emerging-market forum with summit-level heft. Like every serious economic gathering in a disorderly world, it has encountered geopolitics, exactly as the G20 did. The proof is in the action. Over 350 meetings in the run-up to the summit, and the outcomes catalogued. The last one in Rio produced a declaration running to 126 paragraphs, sweeping across trade, climate, technology, humanitarian concerns, and global governance. A........

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