New Delhi had reason to celebrate. For two days in September, Bharat Mandapam hosted gala 18th BRICS summit and the date 12 September became historical as the members of the group adopted the New Delhi Declaration by consensus, even though the UAE and Iran sit on opposite sides of a live war. Official spokespersons and friendly telecast from media houses called it a great diplomatic triumph. Undoubtedly that claim holds. Getting eleven quarrelsome members to sign one text is, after all, not a cakewalk. A harder question sits beneath the applause, though. Can BRICS lay the foundation of a new order that stands as a real alternative to American hegemony, or does it look that way from the host’s podium?
John Bolton, who once served as a national security adviser in Washington, gave a blunt answer. The group, he conceded, keeps expanding and keeps gaining in popularity. That by no means make it a challenger to the United States or to the order Washington leads. In his reading, the challenge comes from two of its members, Russia and China, and not from BRICS as a body. The remark stings Delhi because it strips the bloc of the agency its summits like to flaunt.
The pounding bombardment at a stretch on Iran in April, May and June 2026 showed how thin the optimism could be. The members divided quickly into those who leaned towards Washington and those who stood against it, and India faced a predicament that redounded as a test: choose between Israel and Iran, two partners it had long kept in separate rooms. Oil told the rest of the story. Delhi was happy with discounted Russian crude and said so openly. When American sanctions tightened, it had to budge, and Indian refiners pulled back. Strategic autonomy reads well in a speech. It reads differently when the invoice is settled in dollars.
The summit also met in a rougher and gloomy perspective than the stage lighting suggested. Houthi fighters have been targeting Saudi pipelines, with Israel reportedly supplying intelligence to counter them. Beijing, for its part, speaks openly of integrating Taiwan. Each of these fires burns far from the Bharat Mandapam’s extravagant luxury, yet each one reaches India’s shipping lanes, its workers in the Gulf, or its soldiers on the border. India’s own map looks worse. The defence understanding binding Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, dubbed the Mecca pact, places Pakistan inside a frame that includes a trusted Gulf partner Delhi has courted for a decade. On the eastern side, China keeps up pressure along the frontier, while jihadi elements have found fresh room in post-rebellion Bangladesh. A declaration on multipolarity offers little comfort to India watching its derogation to a sandwiched nation.
Brahma Chellaney is hawkish but reads signals insightfully. This time Brazil’s Lula da Silva, the only leader from the original 2009 BRIC quartet still in office, was conspicuously absent. Likewise, Saudi Arabia sent its foreign minister as Riyadh has adopted a strategy of calculated ambiguity towards BRICS. It has neither completed the formal accession procedure nor declared full membership, and it prefers to describe its presence as that of an invited guest. Lula’s empty chair also carries its own message. The founding figure who argued most loudly for trade outside the dollar chose not to lend his presence to Delhi.
Then there is the text. Talmiz Ahmad, the veteran Indian diplomat, counts nearly 140 paragraphs in the Delhi Declaration, making it the longest BRICS document in twenty years. Its core message, as he reads it, is that the West still dominates the world order. American hegemony and the Western alliance remain the first-order feature of global arrangements, and BRICS, he says, has taken a clear position against that. Everything else in the document follows: the condemnation of terrorism, the firm language on Gaza, the call for full UN membership for Palestine, the proposals on global AI governance. These fill the pages. They do not set its direction.
Here lies the conjecture that matters most in Washington. For years, Beijing and Moscow viewed India as a possible Trojan horse inside BRICS, a Western partner dressed in the tapestry of Global South. The suspicion now runs the other way. The worry in American circles is that New Delhi, sitting inside the grouping, might turn its position against the United States. Hans Dieter Holtzmann has argued that India, as host, could ensure the summit produced an anti-Western message. Media narratives are also indicative of the same tenor and direction. As Hem Saroya’s presentation suggested that the Modi-Putin tango irked the Americans.
Yet the declaration is more subtle than many of its readers. It urged restraint in West Asia without condemning the US-Israeli strikes, and it criticised the global trade war without naming the United States. It spoke of disputes settled through dialogue and diplomacy, and left Ukraine unmentioned. Is that an anti-Western manifesto? It looks more like the work of a hedger who wants every door left ajar. Delhi wants a place in Washington’s Indo-Pacific plans, a leading voice in the Global South, and affordable energy from Moscow without a penalty from the Treasury. For one weekend in September, hosting BRICS allowed it to hold all of these at once.
The weekend is over. China takes the chair in 2027, and the pen passes to a capital with far fewer reasons to hedge. What will India’s careful drafting be worth when Beijing writes the next text? If the grouping does harden into an anti-American front, will Delhi stay inside to soften it, or will it discover, as Riyadh already has, the comfort of being merely a guest? And if BRICS cannot hold its own founders in the room, on what ground does it claim to build a new order for everyone else?
( Writer Dr Gouri Sankar Nag, Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, SKB University & Dr Arpan Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Ramananda College, Bishnupur)
