BRICS is no longer the compact five-member forum that India helped build around the politics of emerging economies. Enlargement has given it a much broader geographic reach, greater demographic and economic weight, and an increasingly powerful claim to represent dissatisfaction with the existing international order. But expansion has also imported more contradictions into a grouping that was never particularly cohesive to begin with.
For India, the significance of BRICS+ goes well beyond the New Delhi summit’s outcome. BRICS+ offers India what the original BRICS could not: a wider Global South constituency and it also confronts New Delhi with a considerably more complicated exercise in coalition management. India must deepen relations with the UAE and other pragmatic middle powers; and engage newer members without allowing continuous expansion to hollow out the grouping. The New Delhi summit is therefore important less as a destination than as the beginning of a larger test for Indian foreign policy: how to make BRICS+ serve India’s multipolar strategy without allowing BRICS+ to define that strategy.

Bigger BRICS, Bigger Opportunity?

There are good reasons why enlargement can work in India’s favor. The original BRICS provided India with an unusual diplomatic space. An enlarged BRICS connects India more systematically with important states across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the wider Global South.

BRICS+ can amplify India’s preferred vocabulary: strategic autonomy, multipolarity, sovereign equality, reformed multilateralism, and greater representation for developing countries. There is an important distinction here. India does not require BRICS to replace the international order. It requires BRICS to increase India’s bargaining power within that order.
The enlarged grouping strengthens India’s case for reform of organizations, and other institutions whose structures inadequately reflect economic and demographic realities. It also provides a platform for India’s Global South diplomacy on development financing, climate justice, technology access, food and energy security, resilient supply chains, and digital public infrastructure.

The UAE, for instance, represents a form of strategic pragmatism closer to India’s own preference for diversified partnerships than to bloc politics. Indonesia brings another major Asian power deeply committed to autonomy. Egypt, Ethiopia, and other participants bring different regional priorities.

The new members make this balancing exercise more complex, but they also provide India with political opportunities as partners.

The NDB: Development Bank or Geopolitical Bank?

Nowhere is this contest over the purpose of BRICS more consequential than in the New Development Bank. The NDB remains arguably BRICS’ most important institutional achievement. As of the end of Q1 2026, the NDB has approved USD 42.9 billion in financing for 140 projects across sectors such as clean energy, transport, water and sanitation, environmental protection, social and digital infrastructure. India has been one of its largest beneficiaries: the Bank stated in March 2026 that it had committed nearly USD 10 billion to 32 Indian projects. Yet the politics surrounding the NDB reflect a deeper disagreement over what BRICS should become.

India should favor a different trajectory. New Delhi’s objective should be to strengthen the NDB as a development institution, not turn it into a geopolitical instrument. India has much to gain from local-currency financing. Indeed, the NDB and Indian authorities are advancing a rupee-denominated bond program expected to mobilize around INR 250 billion over five years. India’s Department of Economic Affairs has also emphasized rupee and yen financing and the development of local-currency operations as the Bank prepares its 2027-31 strategy.

These developments reflect financial diversification with practical developmental purposes: reducing exchange-rate risk, mobilizing domestic capital, and financing infrastructure. The same distinction should inform India’s approach to BRICS payment systems.

Beyond the New Delhi Summit

The New Delhi summit provides India with an opportunity to articulate this broader vision. But India’s success should not be measured by the length of the Delhi Declaration, another round of expansion, or the number of initiatives announced at the summit. It should be measured by whether India can begin shifting BRICS from enlargement to consolidation. India does not necessarily need a continuously expanding BRICS. Enlargement has already produced sufficient geopolitical weight. What the grouping lacks is coherence. Further expansion without clear criteria risks transforming BRICS into an amorphous Global South assembly: large enough to attract global attention but too unwieldy to take meaningful decisions. India therefore has an interest in preserving a distinction between full members, partner countries, and outreach mechanisms rather than assuming that every interested state should eventually become a full member.

New Delhi should therefore approach BRICS+ neither as its principal foreign-policy platform nor as an inconvenient legacy grouping. It should treat it as one pillar of a wider strategy: build multipolarity without accepting bloc politics. That is the significance of the forthcoming summit. Delhi can demonstrate India’s chairmanship; what follows will demonstrate its statecraft.

The central point, then, is not whether BRICS+ is stronger than the old BRICS. It is whether India can make a larger and more contradictory grouping work in favor of a multipolar order that preserves Indian autonomy.