India hosted the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi against a backdrop of escalating West Asian conflicts and deep structural divisions within the expanded economic bloc. While official communiqués broadcast images of seamless bilateral handshakes and standard diplomatic platitudes, the underlying reality reveals a grouping struggling to balance intense ideological contradictions. India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spent the two-day summit engaged in rapid diplomatic maneuvers on the sidelines, trying to prevent Iran’s aggressive anti-Western rhetoric from derailing New Delhi’s delicate balancing act between Washington and the Global South.
The public narrative presented a unified front of emerging economies advocating for a multipolar global order. Behind closed doors, however, the meeting exposed a fundamental struggle over the identity of BRICS.
The Sideline Friction and Iran's Aggressive Stance
The core tension of the summit materialized during bilateral talks between Jaishankar and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Iran, utilizing its newly acquired BRICS platform, launched a fierce rhetorical assault on American foreign policy, calling for collective resistance against what Araghchi termed Western coercion. The Iranian minister explicitly noted that many nations in the room faced variations of the same pressure, declaring that such tactics belonged in the dustbin of history.
This explicit anti-Western posturing places India in an uncomfortable position. New Delhi has spent the last decade cultivating deep strategic, economic, and defense ties with the United States. Concurrently, India needs to maintain its historical relationship with Tehran, particularly to safeguard its investments in the Chabahar Port, which serves as a vital trade gateway to Central Asia.
Jaishankar’s public responses were deliberately restrained, focusing on the evolving situation in West Asia and its broader global economic impact. This neutral framing is a defensive necessity. If India aligns too closely with Iran’s fiery rhetoric, it risks alienating Washington; if it pushes back too hard, it loses its leverage as an independent mediator in the Global South.
Divergent Motives and Strategic Overlap
The expanded BRICS configuration comprises states with fundamentally incompatible geopolitical strategies. The group can be split into two distinct factions:
- The Revisionists: Russia and Iran view the bloc primarily as a geopolitical weapon to actively dismantle Western hegemony, bypass international sanctions, and build an alternative financial architecture detached from the US dollar.
- The Reformers: India, Brazil, and South Africa view the forum as an economic platform to reform existing global institutions, such as the United Nations Security Council and the World Trade Organization, from within, rather than tearing them down.
This division complicates any attempts at deep economic integration. While Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized the collective world majority during his press briefings in Delhi, India’s national statement subtly reminded the forum that respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity must remain the foundation of international relations. This phrasing serves as a quiet but deliberate nod toward China's border assertions and Russia's ongoing military campaigns.
The Illusion of Financial De Dollarization
A central theme of recent BRICS summits has been the creation of a common currency or an alternative payment infrastructure to challenge the supremacy of the US dollar. The New Delhi ministerial meeting proved that this objective remains a distant prospect.
Developing a unified currency requires a level of macroeconomic convergence and trust that does not exist among these members. India and China remain locked in a tense military standoff along their Himalayan border. New Delhi is deeply suspicious of any financial mechanism that could inadvertently increase the global reach of the Chinese yuan at the expense of the Indian rupee.
Instead of a revolutionary currency, the outcome documents revealed a modest focus on optimizing local currency trade settles and improving supply chain resilience. This is a practical compromise, but it falls short of the grand de-dollarization narrative pushed by the bloc's more radical members. For most developing countries, the immediate priority is managing debt vulnerabilities under tightening global conditions, not embarking on a risky financial war with the West.
Managing Global Fallout on a Selective Basis
During the sessions, India urged members to find practical ways to navigate the economic fallout of trade disruptions and volatile energy markets caused by the war involving Israel, the US, and Iran. The economic vulnerabilities are highly localized. While Russia benefits from high energy prices, non-oil producing members in Africa and Latin America face crippling inflation and fertilizer shortages.
Jaishankar noted in his national statement that stability cannot be selective, and peace cannot be piecemeal. Yet, the actions of the individual BRICS states indicate that selectivity is precisely how foreign policy is conducted. Each country enters the room with a unique set of national interests, using the multilateral forum as a megaphone for domestic audiences while cutting transactional bilateral deals on the sidelines with whoever offers the best terms.
The summit concluded without a clear consensus on how to resolve the West Asian crisis, beyond standard calls for a sustained ceasefire and a two-state solution for Palestine. The real work occurred in the quiet bilateral meetings Jaishankar held with the foreign ministers of Egypt, Thailand, and Ethiopia, focusing on localized trade corridors and maritime security rather than sweeping global resolutions.
BRICS operates effectively as a diplomatic talking shop and a symbolic counterweight to the G7. However, as New Delhi proved, the moment the group attempts to transition from a symbolic coalition into a functional security or economic alliance, the deep geopolitical fractures among its members rise directly to the surface.
