Magazine column: Take a Look
Pushpak Gondane
When leaders of eleven nations, representing nearly half the world’s population and roughly 40 per cent of global GDP, gather at Bharat Mandapam this September, the optics will be impeccable: handshakes, group photographs, a carefully worded Delhi Declaration. But behind the staged unity lies a bloc straining at its seams.
India’s BRICS chairship, themed “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” arrives when each word is under assault. The Russia-Ukraine war grinds into its fifth year. Iran remains locked in a shooting war with the US and Israel that has severely disrupted the Strait of Hormuz. And the bloc’s two most powerful Asian members, India and China, share a 3,488-kilometre border they cannot even agree on how to draw.
The Guests: A Cast of Contradictions
Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to attend, in what would be his first India visit in seven years, since the deadly Galwan clashes of June 2020.
Vladimir Putin has been confirmed by the Kremlin. For Putin, BRICS is a lifeline: no summit declaration has ever condemned the Ukraine invasion. Russia’s finances are under strain, while Chinese banks have become increasingly cautious about Russian business because of sanctions risks. Russia uses BRICS to soften the edges of its isolation, but as a dependent partner, not an equal.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is also expected, seeking support while Hormuz remains severely disrupted. Iran has also sought membership in the New Development Bank as it looks for financing options beyond US sanctions.
Not everyone is coming. Brazil’s Lula da Silva is expected to remain in Brazil, while South Africa’s Ramaphosa is expected alongside representatives from Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The newer members bring divergent agendas: Indonesia pushes WTO reform; the UAE wants logistics dominance and has pushed for Hormuz’s reopening; Saudi Arabia prioritises energy security; Egypt seeks development finance; Ethiopia needs debt relief.
These competing priorities make consensus harder, not easier.
Xi’s Visit and the Border Question
On August 25, NSA Ajit Doval met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing for the 25th round of Special Representatives’ talks. The result was an eight-point consensus, including a push for an “Early and Substantial Harvest” on the boundary question and new mechanisms for border management. Two military hotlines in the eastern and central sectors were also agreed.
This matters because boundary delimitation has been stuck for decades; the two nuclear powers do not even agree on the Line of Actual Control’s alignment. Whether the “early harvest” produces actual progress or merely terms of reference for future committees remains to be seen.
For Delhi, Xi’s presence therefore carries significance well beyond BRICS. It puts the India-China relationship, still burdened by the legacy of Galwan, directly into the summit’s diplomatic theatre.
Iran, Hormuz, and the War in the Room
The numbers tell their own story. According to the US Energy Information Administration, oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz averaged 21.6 million barrels a day in the last quarter of 2025. By the second quarter of 2026, they had fallen to just 4.9 million barrels a day. Brent crude reached as high as $118 a barrel in April. For India, this is not abstract. It depends heavily on the Gulf for its energy. Pezeshkian’s presence offers Modi a rare channel to Tehran, but also puts Delhi in a tight spot: hosting an Iranian president while the United States remains India’s most important strategic partner.
The war has also exposed intra-BRICS fissures, underscoring how difficult it is for the grouping to speak with one voice.
A Bloc Built on Contradictions
China accounts for roughly half of the bloc’s combined GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis. IMF figures cited by the BRICS presidency put China’s share of global PPP GDP at 19.6 per cent in 2025, against 40.7 per cent for the eleven-member bloc.
That makes BRICS, in economic terms, heavily weighted towards Beijing.
The New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai and led by Dilma Rousseff, was meant to provide an alternative source of development finance to institutions such as the World Bank. But its scale remains modest, and it put new Russia-related transactions on hold after Western sanctions in 2022.
The bloc’s expansion from five to eleven members since 2024 has added further complexity. BRICS has no charter, no permanent secretariat and no binding voting rules. Decisions depend largely on consensus.
That consensus is becoming harder to achieve. At the May Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Delhi, the bloc could not issue a joint statement because of disagreements over the Iran conflict and instead produced a Chair’s Statement.
BRICS is therefore attempting something inherently difficult: democracies such as India and Brazil are expected to find common ground with authoritarian states, while countries with sharply different strategic interests are expected to present themselves as a coherent geopolitical force.
Trump’s Tariff War: The Dollar Weaponised
As if internal fractures were not enough, the bloc faces an external assault unlike any before: the weaponisation of the dollar itself.
President Trump has launched a sweeping tariff offensive against trading partners around the world. Looming over it is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which passed the US Senate by 86–11 and remains before the House. If enacted, it would give the president authority to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on major importers of Russian energy.
Trump’s message on Truth Social was unambiguous: “Any country aligning with the anti-American policies of the BRICS will face an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff. There will be no exceptions.”
This is not trade policy in the conventional sense. It is financial coercion, and it makes the case for de-dollarisation more powerfully than any BRICS declaration ever could.
When a single country can freeze hundreds of billions in another country’s central bank reserves, restrict access to the international financial system and impose tariffs on trading partners, the dollar ceases to function purely as a neutral medium of exchange. It becomes a weapon.
Every time that weapon is fired, more countries calculate that dependence on it is a strategic vulnerability.
BRICS’ response has not been a dramatic currency launch but a quiet infrastructural pivot. Initiatives have sought to make cross-border payments through national systems easier, reducing dependence on traditional dollar-based channels.
A proposed instrument called “The Unit” has also been discussed as a digital settlement mechanism backed by gold and a basket of BRICS currencies. But it remains a proposal, not a BRICS common currency.
India’s EAM Jaishankar has been careful: “I don’t think there’s any policy on our part to replace the dollar.” He is right. BRICS has no formal common-currency policy.
But it doesn’t need to be. The infrastructure is being built regardless, and Trump’s tariff threats may accelerate rather than arrest the shift. The dollar’s share of global reserves has already fallen substantially from its level at the turn of the century.
Delhi’s Moment
India’s approach has been pragmatic: no push for a common currency or rapid expansion, and a focus instead on development finance, digital infrastructure, climate cooperation and reform of the UN, IMF and WTO.
The summit’s true significance lies not in the Delhi Declaration, which will likely paper over every crack, but in the fact that in a fragmenting world, eleven countries representing nearly half of humanity still find it worth sitting in the same room.
Whether that room becomes an engine of multipolar cooperation or a stage for managed disagreement will depend less on what is said at Bharat Mandapam, and more on what happens after the delegations fly home to their wars, their sanctions, their undrawn borders and a financial system where the world’s reserve currency has become, for many, its most dangerous weapon.
