BRICS at 20: Reforming the World or Repeating Its Fault Lines?
Twenty years after its birth, BRICS has become too large to ignore and too divided to lead. It represents nearly half the world's population and more than a quarter of global merchandise exports, yet it still struggles to answer a fundamental question: what exactly is it? An economic coalition, a geopolitical alliance, a development forum or a diplomatic club? As New Delhi hosts the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam, the real test is no longer whether the world is becoming multipolar. That debate is largely settled. The harder question is whether multipolarity itself can be governed.
BRICS today is no longer debating how to reform the international order. It is debating what kind of international order it wants to build. That contest is most visible in the competing visions of its two largest Asian members. China and Russia increasingly view the expanded bloc as a strategic counterweight to the G7 and the US-led order. India, by contrast, insists that BRICS should remain non-Western, not anti-Western: a platform to democratise global institutions, expand development finance and amplify the concerns of the Global South without becoming another geopolitical camp.
India's role is therefore indispensable. As a member of BRICS, the Quad, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and a strategic partner of the United States, Europe and the Gulf, New Delhi occupies a unique diplomatic space. Far from being contradictory, this reflects India's doctrine of strategic autonomy. More importantly, India acts as BRICS' internal balance wheel. Without New Delhi, the grouping would increasingly resemble a China-Russia strategic compact rather than a genuinely plural coalition of emerging powers.
The summit also offers opportunities that formal diplomacy seldom provides. Bilateral engagements on the sidelines, whether on India-China border management, Gulf energy cooperation or regional security, often achieve more than carefully drafted communiqués. In an era of fractured geopolitics, BRICS functions as a diplomatic decompression chamber where rivals can continue talking despite profound disagreements.
Yet the bloc's greatest challenge lies within. Expansion has undoubtedly increased BRICS' geopolitical visibility, but it has also blurred its institutional identity. Every new member broadens representation while narrowing consensus. Democracies, monarchies and theocratic regimes now coexist under one roof. India and China remain locked in an unresolved border dispute. Iran and the UAE pursue competing regional interests. Egypt and Ethiopia remain divided over the Nile. The organisation increasingly risks becoming a forum that represents everyone but commits to little, echoing the fate of the Non-Aligned Movement, whose declarations often exceeded its influence.
The economic narrative is equally revealing. Much attention has focused on replacing the US dollar with a common BRICS currency. Such claims overlook economic realities. Reserve currencies are sustained not by political declarations but by trust, legal certainty, deep capital markets and full convertibility. None of the BRICS economies individually possesses all these attributes, and collectively they have yet to build them. A shared currency remains improbable. The more realistic agenda lies in expanding local currency settlements, bilateral swap arrangements and interoperable digital payment systems. Even these face constraints arising from capital controls, liquidity gaps and exchange-rate volatility.
The New Development Bank stands as BRICS' most credible institutional achievement, offering infrastructure finance with fewer political conditionalities than traditional lenders. Yet even it remains significantly dependent on dollar-denominated capital markets, underscoring how difficult it is to construct alternatives while operating within a financial system still anchored to the dollar.
BRICS also faces a deeper contradiction. It repeatedly demands democratisation of the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, arguing that global governance no longer reflects contemporary realities. Yet its own internal politics reveal similar asymmetries. China has shown little enthusiasm for India's and Brazil's aspirations for permanent membership of the UN Security Council, mirroring the very resistance to institutional reform that BRICS criticises elsewhere. Reform appears attractive only so long as it does not redistribute influence within the bloc itself.
The China factor therefore deserves sober scrutiny. Ironically, the loudest critic of Western institutional dominance has become the dominant economic actor within BRICS. Chinese manufacturing, finance, infrastructure and supply chains increasingly shape the development choices of many member states. The danger is that a platform created to diversify global power could gradually reproduce hierarchy under a different centre.
India cannot afford either extreme. Walking away would cede the Global South narrative to Beijing. Blind alignment would undermine its strategic autonomy and partnerships elsewhere. New Delhi's challenge is to ensure that BRICS remains a vehicle for institutional reform rather than geopolitical revisionism.
Ultimately, history will not judge BRICS by the number of summits it convenes or communiqués it issues. It will judge whether the bloc can build institutions that outlast headlines, provide development finance, resilient supply chains, climate cooperation and technological partnerships, and demonstrate that multipolarity can produce solutions rather than merely multiply rivalries. If it cannot reconcile its own contradictions, BRICS risks becoming another ambitious acronym that promised to reshape the international order but instead became captive to the fault lines it sought to overcome.