Opinion: Deepen, Preserve, Stabilise: India's Balancing, Multi-Alignment BRICS Act

Updated: Sep 12, 2026 18:58 pm IST Published On Sep 12, 2026 18:57 pm IST Last Updated On Sep 12, 2026 18:58 pm IST

Published On Sep 12, 2026 18:57 pm IST

Last Updated On Sep 12, 2026 18:58 pm IST

There is a larger story behind the three high-level meetings taking place around India's BRICS presidency in New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Chinese President Xi Jinping are not simply three bilateral engagements. Taken together, they offer a window into how India sees a rapidly changing world and how it intends to navigate it.

BRICS itself has come a long way from the informal economic dialogue among Brazil, Russia, India, and China that emerged in 2006. With its subsequent expansion, it has now become an 11-member grouping representing a substantial share of the world's population and roughly 37 per cent of global GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis. Its economic weight now exceeds that of the G7 on this measure. The creation of the New Development Bank and growing experiments with local-currency settlement and alternative payment mechanisms have given the grouping an institutional and economic substance that it did not possess two decades ago. Yet BRICS has also acquired a curious characteristic: its members do not necessarily agree on the world they want to create.

That is not necessarily a weakness. Countries increasingly see BRICS as a platform through which they can hedge against excessive dependence on any single geopolitical or financial centre, strengthen their bargaining power, and give the Global South a greater voice. It is less a bloc than an instrument of strategic flexibility. India's three meetings in New Delhi illustrate precisely this new reality.

Read: "Zero Tolerance For Terrorism": Pahalgam Mention In BRICS New Delhi Declaration

With Russia, India is........

© NDTV