India's Chairship and the Reshaping of Global Order

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The BRICS grouping did not begin as a diplomatic alliance. In 2001, economist Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the term "BRIC" to describe four economies — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — projected to dominate the 21st-century global economy by sheer demographic and growth weight. The descriptor was analytical, not political. The transformation from acronym to intergovernmental forum was shaped by the 2008 global financial crisis and the growing frustration of emerging economies with the West-dominated Bretton Woods order.

The first formal BRIC Summit was held on 16 June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia. South Africa joined in 2010, creating the BRICS we know. For much of the 2010s, BRICS operated as a dialogue forum — annual summits and non-binding declarations. Its most concrete institutional creation was the New Development Bank (NDB), established in 2014 and headquartered in Shanghai, with an initial authorised capital of US$ 100 billion. The NDB represented something genuinely new: a multilateral development bank designed by and for the Global South, free from the conditionality that has long characterised IMF and World Bank lending.

In 2024, BRICS underwent its first major expansion since 2010. Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates became full members on 1 January 2024. Saudi Arabia was formally invited but has not yet acceded. This expansion took the grouping from five to nine full members, representing collectively over 35% of global GDP at purchasing power parity and approximately 45% of the world's population — figures that exceed the G7 on both counts.

The significance of the 2024 expansion

The new members changed the internal character of BRICS. The original five shared a growth-economy narrative. The new entrants include Gulf energy exporters (UAE, Iran), a pivotal Arab state (Egypt), and Africa's second most populous nation (Ethiopia). BRICS is now more resource-rich and geographically diverse, but also more internally heterogeneous. India sits in the same grouping as China — its primary strategic rival — alongside Iran, with which it has a calibrated relationship, and alongside UAE and Egypt, with which it has growing economic ties.

INDIA'S BRICS CHAIRSHIP 2026:

India holds the BRICS Chairship for 2026 — a role that rotates annually among members. The theme selected by India is "BRICS — Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability", whose initial letters spell B-RICS. This is deliberate branding: India frames its chairship as forward-looking and constructive rather than defined by opposition to any external power.

The BRICS Summit 2026 convened on 9 September 2026 in New Delhi, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the conclusion of the summit, addresses five pillars: reform of multilateral institutions, expansion of trade in local currencies, climate finance for the Global South, digital infrastructure cooperation, and food and energy security.

India's strategic calculations as chair

India's chairship arrives at a moment of careful diplomatic balancing. The country is simultaneously a BRICS member, a founding Quad partner (with the United States, Japan, and Australia), and an active participant in the G7+ format. India has consistently rejected the framing of BRICS as an anti-Western or anti-dollar coalition. Instead, it uses the chairship to advance two characteristically Indian objectives: a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and a significantly larger voting share in the IMF and World Bank.

The chairship also allows India to lead the Global South narrative on its own terms, rather than allowing China to dominate that discourse. India's Voice of the Global South Summits (2023 and 2024) pre-positioned New Delhi as a bridge between the developing world and the rich-country club. The 2026 BRICS chairship extends that positioning onto a larger, more formal stage.

The defining intellectual contribution India seeks to make through its chairship is the case for reformed multilateralism — the argument that the institutions built at Bretton Woods (1944) and San Francisco (1945) were calibrated for a post-World War II world that no longer exists. For OPSC/UPSC aspirants, understanding this argument is essential for both the International Relations and Governance sections.

UN Security Council: the permanent seat question

India has pursued UNSC permanent membership for over two decades. The five permanent members — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — reflect the military and political configuration of 1945, not 2026. India, with a population exceeding 1.45 billion, one of the world's five largest economies, and a history of among the highest troop contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations, argues that this architecture is structurally unjust and functionally inadequate for 21st-century crises.

Within BRICS itself, India's push for UNSC reform encounters a structural paradox: China, a permanent member, does not support enlarging the P5. Beijing prefers maintaining the current UNSC structure while using BRICS as an informal power centre. This tension between India's UN ambitions and China's institutional conservatism runs beneath every BRICS declaration on UN reform — the final language is typically aspirational rather than specific.

IMF and World Bank quota reform

The IMF allocates voting rights (quotas) on a formula that heavily weights historical economic size and trade openness, giving the United States an effective veto — it holds over 16% of votes in an institution requiring 85% majority for key decisions. India, China, Brazil, and South Africa have consistently demanded that the quota formula be updated to reflect current economic realities. The BRICS New Delhi Declaration calls for completion of the 17th General Review of Quotas, which has been delayed. Securing even a modest rebalancing would be a concrete diplomatic win for India.

No agenda item within BRICS is more debated — or more frequently misunderstood — than de-dollarisation. The term refers to reducing dependence on the US dollar in international trade and finance. It is not a proposal to destroy the dollar or introduce a BRICS common currency.

Why the dollar remains entrenched

The US dollar accounts for approximately 59% of global foreign exchange reserves and roughly 47% of global trade invoicing (mid-2025 data). Its dominance rests on the depth and liquidity of US capital markets, the absence of capital controls, and the legal enforceability of dollar-denominated contracts. No BRICS currency currently meets these conditions. The Chinese renminbi — the most plausible alternative — is not fully convertible, and China's capital controls make it structurally unsuited as a global reserve currency in the near term.

India's position: nuanced, not maximalist

India supports trade in local currencies in specific bilateral contexts. The Reserve Bank of India has promoted rupee settlement for trade, particularly with Russia following 2022 sanctions disruptions. A rupee-rouble arrangement was activated, but ran into practical difficulty: Russia accumulated large rupee balances it struggled to deploy productively. India supports the principle of currency diversification while firmly opposing any mandatory BRICS common currency, which would require a monetary union India is unprepared and unwilling to join.

The 2026 New Delhi Declaration is expected to endorse a BRICS Local Currency Settlement Framework — a voluntary mechanism permitting member states to conduct bilateral trade in their own currencies using agreed clearing arrangements. The mBridge project (a multi-currency digital payment platform developed with BIS Innovation Hub participation) and the concept of BRICS Pay represent the operational middle ground between continued dollar dependence and a monetary union.

BRICS collectively accounts for a substantial share of global greenhouse gas emissions — China is the world's largest emitter, India the third-largest. Yet these are also the economies most constrained in their ability to finance the energy transition, and most exposed to its costs if the transition stalls.

India's NDC commitments

India's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement commits to achieving 50% of cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030, and a net-zero emissions target by 2070. These are ambitious commitments for an economy still dependent on coal for a majority of its electricity generation and still lifting large segments of its population out of energy poverty. India's position is explicit: it will not sacrifice development to solve a climate crisis it did not primarily cause.

Climate finance: the broken promise

Within BRICS, India leads the demand for operationalising climate finance commitments made by developed countries. The COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009) commitment of US$ 100 billion per year in climate finance from developed to developing nations was only nominally met in 2022, and its composition — dominated by loans rather than grants — remains contested. The BRICS New Delhi Declaration calls for the full operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund established at COP27 (Sharm el-Sheikh, 2022), and for climate finance to flow primarily as grants and concessional loans rather than commercial debt instruments.

Green Hydrogen Partnership

A BRICS Green Hydrogen Partnership is a key outcome of the 2026 Summit. India brings its National Green Hydrogen Mission (launched 2023) to this partnership, targeting 5 million metric tonnes of green hydrogen production per year by 2030. Collaboration with BRICS Gulf members — the UAE and potentially Saudi Arabia — is particularly valuable: Gulf states have access to some of the world's cheapest solar energy, making them natural green hydrogen producers if electrolyser technology and export infrastructure are developed with India's cooperation.

For examination purposes, the ability to articulate both the promise and the structural tensions of BRICS demonstrates analytical depth that mere description cannot. Several fractures run through the grouping that no declaration, however eloquent, can fully resolve.

The India-China asymmetry

India and China are simultaneously BRICS partners and strategic rivals with an unresolved territorial dispute. The 2020 Galwan Valley confrontation — resulting in casualties on both sides, the first in 45 years along the Line of Actual Control — fundamentally altered the bilateral relationship. While some partial disengagement at friction points has occurred since, the LAC dispute remains active and Indian troop deployments in the Himalayas remain elevated. India participates in BRICS with full awareness that its largest internal partner is also its most significant external challenge. This shapes India's refusal to allow BRICS to become a vehicle for specifically anti-US positions that could compromise its strategic partnerships with Washington.

The democratic deficit

Of BRICS' nine current members, Russia, China, Iran, and Ethiopia are governed by authoritarian systems by standard indicators. India, Brazil, and South Africa are functioning multi-party democracies. The UAE is a constitutional monarchy with consultative elements. Egypt holds elections within an authoritarian framework. For India — which projects its democratic identity as a diplomatic asset and a basis for its partnership with the West — this internal heterogeneity creates a values asymmetry. India cannot credibly champion democratic governance in multilateral fora while co-signing BRICS declarations that implicitly legitimise the domestic governance of Iran or Russia.

• Reform multilateralism, not reject it
  • India's most durable contribution through BRICS 2026 is to establish itself as the voice that distinguishes Global South advocacy from anti-Western positioning. India should push for completion of the IMF 17th Quota Review, concrete timelines for UNSC expansion negotiations, and WTO reform to address the agricultural subsidy asymmetry — all through engagement with, not rejection of, existing institutions. BRICS can generate political momentum for reform without replacing the institutions it seeks to reform.
• Expand the NDB's project pipeline in eastern India
  • India should use its chairship to advocate for NDB project pipelines specifically targeted at resource-rich but infrastructure-poor states — Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Bihar. Climate adaptation infrastructure (flood barriers, cyclone-resilient housing, urban drainage) and industrial connectivity (port-rail links, mineral corridor development) in these states align precisely with NDB's stated mandate. A concrete commitment from the NDB to a multi-state eastern India infrastructure programme would be a tangible BRICS dividend.
• Export India's Digital Public Infrastructure
  • India's Digital Public Infrastructure — the UPI payments system, Aadhaar-linked identity verification, DigiLocker, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) — represents an exportable governance model. India has already begun bilateral DPI deployments with Singapore, the UAE, France, and several African nations. BRICS provides a multilateral channel for scaling this export. If India's DPI framework is adopted by even three or four BRICS members as a template for their own digital governance systems, it establishes both technological interoperability and a form of soft power India currently lacks in multilateral institutions.
• Manage the China paradox with clarity
  • India should engage with China within BRICS on issues where their interests genuinely align — IMF reform, climate finance, WTO agriculture — while maintaining its firm posture on bilateral issues: the LAC dispute, trade deficit correction, and technology supply chain concerns. The worst outcome would be for India to allow BRICS diplomacy to be used to signal a softening of its position on China in exchange for cosmetic cooperation wins. BRICS and the bilateral relationship with China must be managed on separate tracks with separate logic.

• BRIC coined by: Jim O'Neill, Goldman Sachs, in 2001
• First BRIC Summit: 16 June 2009, Yekaterinburg, Russia
• South Africa joined BRICS: 2010 (BRIC became BRICS)
• 2024 new BRICS members: Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, UAE (effective 1 January 2024) — Saudi Arabia invited but not formally acceded
• India BRICS Chairship 2026 theme: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" — acronym B-RICS
• BRICS Summit 2026: 9 September 2026, New Delhi, chaired by PM Narendra Modi
• New Development Bank (NDB): Established 2014, HQ Shanghai, initial authorised capital US$ 100 billion
• BRICS share of global GDP (PPP): Over 35% — exceeds the G7; share of world population ~45%
• India NDC under Paris Agreement: 50% non-fossil fuel installed electricity capacity by 2030; net-zero by 2070