The Pulse | Diplomacy | South Asia

BRICS Declaration: India’s Great U-turn on Iran

The declaration endorsed most of Iran’s main diplomatic concerns without speaking a single word against its drone and missile attacks on its neighboring Gulf states.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian being honored at a meeting with a group of Indian religious leaders, intellectuals, and businesspeople in New Delhi, India, on Sept. 11, 2026, the eve of the 18th BRICS Summit.

Before the BRICS summit in New Delhi, political analysts had warned that India would have to do a very difficult tightrope walk given the presence of China, Russia, and Iran. It was a foregone conclusion that they would use this platform for U.S. bashing. With India’s current tug-of-war with the Donald Trump administration, the honchos at South Block (India’s foreign ministry headquarters) used nuanced vocabulary and calibrated the final declaration in such a way that the United States was not named, but the declaration explicitly called for an end to unilateral economic sanctions, protectionist trade measures, and arbitrary tariffs.

The surprising outcome of the summit is this: what is being hailed as a triumph of strategic autonomy saw the dilution of India’s foreign policy since the advent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The BRICS summit was billed as the Modi show, but Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stole that thunder if one looks at the details of the Delhi declaration. The declaration endorsed most of Iran’s main diplomatic concerns without speaking a single word against its drone and missile attacks on its neighboring Gulf states. There was likewise no mention of Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who have in recent times increased attacks on Saudi Arabia and held sea trade across the Red Sea hostage. The presence of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed Al Nahyan and his meeting with the Iranian president did not yield any tangible result, which India could have hailed as a diplomatic success of its foreign policy. Instead, India urged “maximum restraint” in West Asia.

The other clear shift in Indian foreign policy was seen in the absence of any mention of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” On the contrary, Israel was explicitly named and told to withdraw its forces from Lebanese territory. The declaration demanded unrestricted humanitarian aid to Gaza and opposed the forced........

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