Power creates opportunities. Institutions create history. BRICS has completed twenty years ~ expanding its membership, enlarging its economic weight and becoming an increasingly consequential voice of the Global South. Yet power alone does not make a grouping consequential. The harder task is to turn numbers into effectiveness, diversity into cooperation and declarations into outcomes.

Now comprising eleven full members and ten partner countries, BRICS has acquired unprecedented reach, but enlargement has also raised the demands placed upon it. During the first eight months of its chairship, India has sought to move the grouping from dialogue towards delivery, with five joint declarations, three new centres or platforms and a landmark MOU on standardisation. Its approach reflects a wider vision of BRICS as a forum for multipolar development, grounded in multipolarity, multilateralism and strategic autonomy.

As New Delhi prepares to host the 18th Summit on September 12-13 under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” the central challenge is no longer expansion but effectiveness ~ whether an enlarged BRICS can convert its growing weight into durable institutional capacity and tangible outcomes. That challenge begins with the architecture of enlargement itself. The Kazan Summit of October 2024 created the partner-country modality, allowing wider participation without forcing an immediate choice between inclusion and full membership.

Ten countries received partner status in 2025, while Cuba, Nigeria, Malaysia and Thailand have shown interest in deeper engagement, and Türkiye and Azerbaijan have also indicated interest in joining. The attraction is clear, but expansion carries a paradox: every additional voice increases representational weight while raising the transaction costs of consensus. Russia and China have generally favoured faster enlargement, while India and Brazil have preferred a more calibrated approach, including the partner-country model.

The answer need not be to close the door, but to ensure that the door does not become wider than the room. Consensus, institutional preparedness and demonstrable contribution should guide enlargement, with full membership continuing to rest on consensus among BRICS members. Coherence, however, cannot mean sameness. BRICS already possesses the beginnings of an institutional architecture ~ summit diplomacy, ministerial dialogues, the Sherpa process, specialised working groups, business and academic networks, the New Development........

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