Across more than 350 meetings in a single year, India’s 2026 BRICS presidency pushed an eleven-nation bloc — split at times over the war in West Asia and rival global alignments — toward an unanimously adopted declaration in New Delhi.
BRICS is no longer the tidy five-country club it was when the grouping first met in 2009. By the time India took over the chair on January 1, 2026, the bloc had grown to include Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia — with Saudi Arabia continuing to engage as an invited country whose formal accession Riyadh has still not confirmed — plus ten partner states stretching from Belarus to Vietnam. That expansion gave BRICS more economic heft, representing close to 40 percent of global GDP and roughly half the world’s population, but it also imported the rivalries of its new members: an Iran at war footing in West Asia sitting across the table from the UAE, a Russia under Western sanctions alongside partners still courting Washington, and members with sharply different views on how far the bloc should go in challenging the existing global order.
It fell to India, hosting its fourth BRICS chairship after 2012, 2016 and 2021, to keep that expanded coalition functional through a year when the Gaza and wider West Asia conflict, tariff threats from the United States, and internal disagreements over language repeatedly tested the group’s ability to speak with one voice. By the time leaders gathered at Bharat Mandapam on September 12-13 for the 18th BRICS Summit, India’s diplomatic machinery — sherpas, ministers, working groups and the Ministry of External Affairs — had run what Indian officials describe as more than 350 meetings over eight months, culminating in the unanimous adoption of the 140-paragraph New Delhi Declaration.
India’s Diplomatic Approach
India built its chairship around a single theme — “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” — unveiled by External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar on January 13, 2026, alongside the chairship logo and the official brics2026.gov.in website. The theme, officials said, reflected the “people-centric and humanity-first” approach Prime Minister Narendra Modi had articulated at the previous year’s summit in Rio de Janeiro. Rather than pursuing sweeping new declarations of intent, India’s stated approach was to convert two decades of BRICS rhetoric into working mechanisms: portals, frameworks, action plans and working groups that could outlast any single chairship.
Opening the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in May, Jaishankar described a world “at a time of considerable flux” and framed India’s task less as forcing agreement on every contentious issue than as keeping channels of dialogue open even where consensus proved elusive — a philosophy that would be tested repeatedly over the following months.
Diplomatic Engagement: A Year of Meetings
India’s chairship calendar moved in stages. The first BRICS Sherpas’ and Sous-Sherpas’ meeting, held in New Delhi on February 9-10 and chaired by India’s Sherpa, Secretary (Economic Relations) Sudhakar Dalela, set the year’s roadmap; it also marked the first time a partner country, Belarus, took part in the sherpa-level format. As the West Asia conflict intensified through the spring, India used the sherpa channel itself as a crisis-management tool — the Ministry of External Affairs confirmed that a virtual meeting of BRICS Sherpas was convened on March 12 specifically to discuss the deteriorating regional situation, after spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal acknowledged that “differences among member countries have made it difficult for the grouping to forge a consensus.”
That difficulty became visible on April 24, when a meeting of BRICS Deputy Foreign Ministers and Special Envoys on the Middle East and North Africa in New Delhi could only produce a carefully worded Chair’s Statement rather than a joint text — an early sign of the gap India would later need to close. Weeks later, the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting of May 14-15 at Bharat Mandapam, the first ministerial gathering of India’s chairship, likewise ended without a joint communiqué, reporting from Forbes India and other outlets noted, as members remained split over how to characterise the war. On the sidelines, Jaishankar held bilateral meetings with counterparts including Iran’s Abbas Araghchi and Indonesia’s Sugiono, part of a pattern of parallel bilateral diplomacy that ran alongside every major BRICS gathering of the year.
Security and counter-terrorism cooperation moved forward with fewer public disagreements. The 11th BRICS Counter Terrorism Working Group met in New Delhi on May 21-22, marking ten years since the working group’s creation; Secretary (West) Sibi George told delegates that BRICS members had extended solidarity to India after the April 2025 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, that killed 26 people. A Joint Working Group on Security in the Use of Information and Communication Technologies followed on June 8-9, and National Security Advisers — including India’s Ajit Doval, China’s Wang Yi and Russia’s Sergey Shoigu — met in New Delhi on June 22-23 to review both working groups’ output before calling on Prime Minister Modi.
Sectoral ministerial meetings ran throughout the summer: agriculture ministers convened in Indore on June 12-13, finance ministers and central bank governors met first in Jaipur on August 12-13 and then in Mumbai on September 9-10 under Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and the ICT Working Group met in Pune on August 19. An Academic Forum organised with the Observer Research Foundation and Research and Information System for Developing Countries was held in Lucknow on August 23-25. The BRICS Business Forum, bringing together the Business Council, the Women’s Business Alliance and government ministers including Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, opened the summit week itself on September 11.
Building Consensus Amid Real Differences
India’s central diplomatic challenge in 2026 was not generating new ideas but stopping the bloc’s internal disagreements — chiefly between Iran and the UAE over how to characterise the West Asia conflict — from blocking any collective statement at all, as had already happened at the April special envoys’ meeting and the May ministerial. According to reporting from India Writes and other outlets tracking the negotiations, talks over the New Delhi Declaration’s language on the war continued until the early hours of September 12, with Iran and the UAE reaching what was described as a lastminute compromise on mutually acceptable wording before the document went to leaders for adoption.
India’s position in facilitating that compromise rested on a diplomatic balancing act rather than a mediating role it claimed for itself: New Delhi maintains active relationships with both Tehran and Abu Dhabi, alongside partnerships with Washington and Israel, giving it room to engage across the divide without being seen to take sides. On the margins of the summit, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian held talks with his UAE counterpart in New Delhi — an engagement that outlets including Organiser and India Narrative described as made possible by the platform India’s presidency provided, though the substance of that bilateral exchange remained a matter between Tehran and Abu Dhabi rather than an India-brokered outcome. When Modi announced the declaration’s adoption on September 12, he told leaders, “No member has raised any objection. The New Delhi Declaration 2026 is adopted unanimously” — a collective decision of all eleven members, distinct from any individual proposal India itself had put forward during the year.
Sectoral Cooperation: From Farms to Fintech
Beyond the geopolitical text, India’s chairship generated a long list of sectorspecific frameworks, most agreed at working-group and ministerial level over the year and folded into the summit’s outcomes. In agriculture, ministers meeting in Indore agreed to set up networks on regenerative and digital farming, launched the Agro-Inputs, Genetic Resources and Information Network (AGRIN), and established a Global Forum on Farmers’ Rights in Seed Systems, which India will initially coordinate through its Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority. In health, members agreed to create an Expert Group on traditional, complementary and integrative medicine, a Network of Centres of Excellence on Mental Wellness to be coordinated by India’s NIMHANS, a 2026-2029 roadmap for healthy lifestyles, and an Expert Group on an integrated early-warning system for infectious diseases.
On trade, the Jaipur Consensus produced a workplan on internationalising micro, small and medium enterprises, including a proposed study of a BRICS Invoice Discounting Mechanism, while trade ministers adopted a 2026-2030 Global Value Chains Action Plan and principles for digitally delivered crossborder services.
The transport track adopted a Logistics Supply-Chain Cooperation Framework. In technology, the industry track adopted an action plan on startup-led innovation, including a proposed BRICS Startup Innovation Fund and Incubator Network, while the science track welcomed a new BRICS Science and Research Repository and the ICT track proposed a Digital Public Infrastructure repository and pilot projects. On energy, members adopted Guiding Principles on Energy Storage and Smart Grids and launched a Digital Centre of Excellence on the subject, alongside a new BRICS forum on Sustainable Aviation Fuels.
Space agencies agreed to amend the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation Agreement to accommodate new members, and customs administrations agreed to voluntarily implement a BRICS Authorised Economic Operator Action Plan for 2026.
On the people-to-people track — a pillar India emphasised throughout the year — a 2026 BRICS Youth Cooperation Framework was adopted, guidelines for women’s digital capacity-building were developed, and India’s youth affairs ministry, through the MY Bharat platform, mobilised what it described as one million hours of youth volunteering between late April and July as part of the chairship’s public outreach.
Key Initiatives and the AI Push
Artificial intelligence emerged as one of the year’s more concrete additions to the BRICS agenda. At the summit, leaders committed to implementing the “BRICS Leaders’ Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence” and congratulated India on hosting the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026 — a separate, wider event at which a New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact was endorsed by 89 countries and organisations, distinct from the BRICS-specific declaration adopted in September. On the financial side, the leaders’ declaration recorded support for further expansion of the New Development Bank, whose Board of Governors had already added Uzbekistan as its tenth member on June 5, 2026; India’s chairship separately helped launch a BRICS-NDB Knowledge Portal intended to preserve policy experience across chairships.
Opening the summit’s plenary session, Modi put forward his own proposal — not yet a collective BRICS decision but an idea floated by the chair — for a “BRICS continuity and implementation mechanism” built around a rotating “Troika” arrangement and a digital repository to track the status of the bloc’s various initiatives, framing it as a way to stop good ideas from lapsing between chairships.
The Summit and Its Outcome
The 18th BRICS Summit opened on September 12 with a closed leaders’ session at which the New Delhi Declaration was adopted, followed the next day by an open plenary — titled “Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability: Shaping the Future for Inclusive Global Growth” — bringing in partner countries and outreach guests including the leaders of Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, alongside UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin both attended in person, along with the leaders or senior representatives of the other member states.
The declaration’s 140 paragraphs covered reform of the UN Security Council, the IMF and the WTO; condemnation of the Pahalgam terror attack and a call for stronger international counter-terrorism cooperation; concern over the West Asia conflict and a call for a Gaza ceasefire and Palestinian statehood; and commitments across trade, energy, health and technology. It also recorded the blocs thanks to India for hosting the year’s chairship and extended support to China, which takes over as BRICS chair for 2027 and will host the 19th summit.
A Diplomatic Role Grounded in Documented Outcomes
What India’s 2026 chairship demonstrates, on the available record, is less a single dramatic breakthrough than a year of sustained institutional work — sherpa meetings, working groups and ministerial tracks — that kept an increasingly diverse eleven-member bloc talking to each other even when, as in April and May, that talking did not yet produce agreement. The eventual compromise between Iran and the UAE on the declaration’s language, reached in the final hours before the summit, was the clearest test of whether that groundwork would hold; the unanimous adoption of the New Delhi Declaration on September 12 was BRICS’s collective answer, not India’s alone. Whether the various portals, frameworks and working groups launched over the year translate into lasting cooperation will depend on implementation long after India hands the chair to China at the start of 2027 — a question the documented record of 2026 does not yet answer, but one the mechanisms India put in place, including Modi’s proposed continuity mechanism, were explicitly designed to address.
