Prime Minister Narendra Modi used India's presidency of the BRICS grouping this week to press one of the boldest arguments of his foreign policy tenure: that the Global South must stop merely following the rules written by Western powers after the Second World War and start writing them. Speaking in New Delhi as he opened the summit before Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders, Modi called for urgent reform of the United Nations Security Council and a shift in global governance from privilege to partnership.

The summit, held against a backdrop of ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and rising friction between Washington and several BRICS members, tested how far the bloc's disparate members are willing to go in presenting a united front. The result was a New Delhi Declaration that reflected both the ambition of India's agenda and the limits imposed by internal disagreement, particularly from the United Arab Emirates and Iran, which moderated harder-line positions during negotiations.

A Ten-Point Push for Inclusive Governance

Modi presented what officials described as ten BRICS proposals aimed at making global governance more inclusive and multilateral, alongside a specific call to establish a Seafarers Emergency Support Network to protect maritime workers caught in conflict zones. This reflected the disruption commercial shipping has faced amid regional wars and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

At a separate leaders' meeting, Modi went further, proposing a concrete roadmap for implementing governance reforms by 2027. The timeline suggests India is trying to convert rhetorical solidarity among developing nations into an actual institutional deadline, a departure from previous BRICS summits that often produced broad statements of intent without measurable targets.

"The grouping is not against anyone," Modi told reporters, a comment aimed at deflecting suggestions that BRICS is positioning itself as an anti-Western bloc. He also held an hour-long meeting with Xi, a sign of the diplomatic weight both nations placed on managing their bilateral relationship even as competition between them persists across Asia.

Old Ambitions, New Urgency

India's push echoes a debate that has simmered since the original BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, first met as a bloc in 2008. Analysts at the time speculated that the grouping's growing economic weight might eventually translate into political power capable of challenging the entrenched interests of the West, with China dominating manufacturing, India specializing in services, and Russia and Brazil supplying raw materials. Yet the shared identity that binds BRICS has always been thin. The four founding members had, and still have, relatively little in common beyond a shared frustration with the postwar order, raising persistent doubts about how durable any economic or political cooperation would prove.

Those doubts were reinforced during the 2008 global financial crisis, when hopes that emerging economies could "decouple" from Western turmoil proved largely unfounded. China, India and other members all felt the contagion in different ways, from collapsing export demand to currency pressure. India's own experience, including a significant slide in the rupee and a widening current account deficit in the early 2010s, underscored how exposed even fast-growing economies remained to shocks originating in the United States and Europe.

UAE and Iran Soften Their Lines

That history of fragile cohesion was visible again in New Delhi. The final declaration called for "maximum restraint" in the region's ongoing conflict but stopped short of specifically condemning recent strikes, while including language that rebuffed Israel. Notably, both the UAE and Iran, two members whose regional rivalries and differing relationships with Washington could easily have derailed consensus, stepped back from tougher positions they had initially pushed during negotiations.

That compromise illustrates the central challenge facing any Indian-led effort to turn BRICS into a coherent voice for the Global South: the bloc's expanded membership, which now includes Gulf states alongside founding powers and other emerging economies, has made consensus harder, not easier, to achieve. Where the original BRIC quartet struggled to find common purpose beyond opposing Western dominance, the enlarged grouping must also reconcile the competing regional interests of the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

Washington Watches Closely

The summit unfolded amid heightened tension between the United States and several BRICS members, a dynamic that has sharpened since Washington's relations with Moscow deteriorated and trade friction with Beijing persisted. American officials have long viewed BRICS with suspicion, wary that its calls for alternative financial mechanisms and reformed institutions amount to an attempt to erode dollar-based and Western-led systems that Washington has anchored since Bretton Woods.

For India, the summit offered a chance to position itself as a pragmatic broker within the bloc, one capable of hosting Putin and Xi under the same roof while still emphasizing that BRICS is not designed to be adversarial. Whether Modi's 2027 roadmap for governance reform gains real traction will depend on whether the bloc's members, still divided by rivalry, regional conflict and diverging relationships with Washington, can sustain the unity that produced the New Delhi Declaration in the first place.