The 18th BRICS Summit, opening Saturday and running through Sunday, arrives at a moment when the bloc itself is marking two decades since its conception, and this year’s edition carries the added weight of being the first hosted by India since the grouping’s dramatic expansion beyond its original five founding members.
What began in 2006 as an informal shorthand for four rising economies has, over twenty years, evolved into an eleven-nation bloc that brings together all 11 BRICS members alongside partner nations and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
The expansion has taken the group well beyond its five founding members, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Indonesia.
That growth has turned what was once a niche acronym coined by an investment bank economist into a bloc claiming roughly half the world’s population and nearly two-fifths of global GDP figures. India’s foreign ministry has been keen to underline it as it stages its fourth chairmanship of the group, following earlier turns in 2012, 2016, and 2021.
The choreography of arrivals is already under way. Russian President Vladimir Putin touched down in the early hours of Friday, received at the airport by Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh, with Indian officials publicly framing the visit around what they describe as a longstanding special and privileged strategic partnership between the two countries.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was expected to land later the same day.
Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar was already working the bilateral circuit by Friday, meeting Brazil’s Mauro Vieira, who is standing in for President Lula, for talks that reportedly touched on trade, defence, energy, agriculture, and space cooperation, alongside coordination on UN and G20 matters.
Saturday will bring the summit’s marquee arrival: Chinese President Xi Jinping is due in Delhi around midday, his first trip to India in nearly seven years, a visit that will inevitably draw scrutiny given the two Asian giants’ unresolved border dispute, one of several fault lines analysts say run beneath the bloc’s public displays of unity.
Not every BRICS leader is making the trip personally, a reminder that the bloc’s unity is often more textured than its official photographs suggest. Nigeria will be represented by Vice President Kashim Shettima rather than President Bola Tinubu, while the UAE is sending Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Brazil’s presence, as noted, will be at the foreign minister level rather than presidential. Alongside the core eleven, India has assembled a broad guest list of partner countries and outreach invitees from Southeast Asian leaders, including Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto, Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim, and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to African heads of state, such as Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, and Burundi’s Évariste Ndayishimiye, plus senior officials from Kazakhstan, Belarus, Cuba, Bahrain, Uruguay, and beyond.
Multilateral institutions are also in the room: UN chief António Guterres, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff.
The summit’s official theme, “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability,” is meant to anchor two days of programming that India has spent much of the year building toward; under its chairship, more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements have already been held across over 25 cities in India in the run-up to this weekend.
Saturday’s proceedings open with a closed-door leaders’ session on inclusive global governance and multilateralism, followed by a tour of the “Bharat Innovates” exhibition, a family photograph, a joint tree-planting ceremony, and a gala dinner hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is also expected to hold a string of bilateral meetings on the sidelines.
Sunday broadens the guest list further, with partner countries and outreach invitees joining for a session on shaping inclusive global growth.
Beneath the choreography, though, sits a bloc analysts describe as carrying real internal contradictions, from the India-China border standoff to sharply differing views among members on how confrontational to be toward Western-led institutions and the perennial difficulty of turning summit communiqués into concrete outcomes.
With member states holding sharply different positions on conflicts dominating this year’s agenda, particularly the war involving Iran, the New Delhi summit is widely seen as a test of how much cohesion an increasingly diverse BRICS can still project on the world stage, even as it marks two decades of trying.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
BRICS has outgrown its original five-nation core into an eleven-member bloc representing nearly half the world’s population and about 40% of global GDP, but its New Delhi summit this weekend is less a show of unity than a test of whether that expanded, increasingly diverse group can still act as one.
With Xi making his first India visit in seven years, unresolved tensions like the India-China border dispute and members split over conflicts such as the war involving Iran, the real story isn’t the size of the guest list; it’s whether a bigger BRICS can still agree on anything that matters.
