That is precisely the story of BRICS.
Great institutions rarely announce themselves at birth. They arrive quietly, often in the margins of unrelated documents, and only decades later do we recognise the moment they began.
There is a certain irony in the fact that one of the most consequential groupings challenging the old architecture of global power did not begin in a chancellery or a treaty room. It began on a spreadsheet. In 2001, Jim O’Neill, then an economist at Goldman Sachs, coined the term “BRIC” to bundle together four large, fast-growing economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — as a thesis for investors chasing tomorrow’s growth. It was market shorthand, nothing more. And yet, in one of history’s quieter accidents, a phrase meant to sell mutual funds ended up naming a movement. Nations rarely borrow their identity from an economist’s memo; BRICS did, and then outgrew it entirely.
Two decades on, that borrowed acronym has become something its author could scarcely have intended: a forum speaking, however imperfectly, for close to half of humanity; a bloc commanding a formidable share of global output; and an increasingly assertive voice demanding that the architecture of global governance catch up with the realities of the twenty-first century. As BRICS marks the twentieth year since its first ministerial gathering, India assumes its fourth presidency of the grouping — not as a ceremonial rotation, but at a genuine inflection point, when the old order is visibly straining and the new one has yet to be written. History and leadership have converged, and what India does with that convergence will matter far beyond this single year.
The Weight of Being India
India’s claim to this moment rests on something more durable than diplomatic turn-taking. It rests on a demonstrated capacity — rare among nations — to inhabit multiple, even competing, geopolitical architectures without being captured by any of them. India sits at the table of BRICS and the Quad, the G20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, treating these not as contradictions to be managed but as complementary instruments of a single, coherent foreign policy built on dialogue, development and national interest. This is not fence-sitting; it is strategic autonomy of a mature and confident kind. It allows New Delhi to function as something increasingly scarce in world affairs — a genuine bridge, connecting the developed and the developing world, the established powers and the rising ones.
To understand why this bridge matters, it helps to trace how BRICS itself evolved. The grouping’s first true summit, held in Yekaterinburg in 2009, converted an economic acronym into a forum for political consultation. South Africa’s entry the following year turned BRIC into BRICS, giving the African continent a permanent seat at a table it had long been denied. Then came the more dramatic expansion of 2024 and 2025, when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia joined as full members, alongside a widening circle of partner states. Each addition was proof that BRICS had become something nations actively sought to join — not merely observe.
But growth of this kind invites an uncomfortable question: what, beyond geography and grievance, actually holds together a coalition spanning such different political systems, economic models and regional rivalries?
The honest answer is not ideology but aspiration. BRICS is bound less by what its members believe than by what they want — a global governance architecture that reflects today’s distribution of power and possibility, rather than the settlement drawn up in the rubble of 1945. Institutions like the UN Security Council, the IMF and the World Bank still largely mirror a world that no longer exists. As emerging economies contribute an ever-larger share of global growth, trade and innovation, their demand for a proportionate voice in shaping the rules is neither radical nor new. It is simply overdue.
Reform, Not Rupture
India has championed this cause with a deliberate and distinctive restraint. Where some voices within BRICS have been tempted to frame the grouping as a counterweight to the West, India has resisted that framing at every turn, insisting instead that BRICS ought to complement the existing multilateral order rather than replace it. This is not a semantic nicety. It is the through-line of Indian diplomacy since independence — a refusal to define itself by opposition, and an insistence on expanding the table rather than overturning it.
This philosophy finds its clearest expression in the theme India has chosen for its 2026 presidency: “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” Read carefully, the theme is less a slogan than a manifesto. Resilience speaks to a world still recovering from pandemic shocks and fractured supply chains. Innovation acknowledges that the coming decades will be shaped by whoever masters artificial intelligence, semiconductors, biotechnology and clean energy — and that the Global South cannot afford to be a spectator to that race. Cooperation reasserts the value of dialogue in an age addicted to polarisation. And sustainability insists that growth divorced from ecological responsibility is no longer growth worth having.
Even the visual identity of India’s presidency carries this intent. The official emblem — chosen through a nationwide public competition rather than handed down by bureaucratic fiat — entwines the lotus with the gesture of Namaste. The lotus, rising unstained from difficult waters, has long stood in Indian iconography for resilience and renewal; Namaste, a gesture requiring no shared language to be understood, speaks of humility and mutual respect. That ordinary citizens helped choose this symbol is itself a quiet statement: India’s engagement with the world is not the property of its government alone, but an extension of a civilisational instinct for welcome.
Institutions, Not Just Intentions
If BRICS is to be judged by more than its declarations, its balance sheet must include the institutions it has actually built. The most significant of these is the New Development Bank, established in 2014 at the Fortaleza Summit with an authorised capital of USD 100 billion. Unlike the Bretton Woods institutions, where voting weight tracks economic contribution, the NDB was founded on a principle of near-equal footing among its members — a small but symbolically important correction to a world where capital has usually meant control. In the years since, it has financed renewable energy, urban transit, clean water and digital infrastructure projects across the developing world, evidence that BRICS can build, and not merely critique.
Alongside it stands the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a financial safety net conceived the same year to cushion member states against sudden external shocks. It does not seek to supplant the IMF; it exists, more modestly, as an additional layer of resilience — proof that BRICS’s ambition has always been addition rather than confrontation.
Around these financial pillars, the grouping has steadily widened its remit — into public health, digital governance, agriculture, disaster management, science and people-to-people exchange. What began as an investment thesis has become, however unevenly, a working platform for cooperation among nations facing strikingly similar developmental puzzles.
The scale involved is difficult to overstate. Following its recent expansion, BRICS now represents nearly half the world’s population and roughly 37 per cent of global GDP measured in purchasing power parity — a demographic and economic weight matched by no comparable grouping. More than twenty additional countries are reported to have expressed interest in joining or deepening ties with the bloc, a fact that speaks less to the cleverness of its branding than to a genuine hunger, across the developing world, for a table where their voice is not an afterthought.
The Fault Lines Ahead
Yet numbers alone do not make an institution durable, and it would be a disservice to India’s presidency to describe this moment without naming its difficulties honestly.
BRICS still operates without a permanent secretariat — an institutional gap that would be unthinkable for the United Nations, the European Union, or even ASEAN. Each presidency effectively starts from a blank page, and initiatives launched with fanfare under one chair often lose momentum under the next. If BRICS intends to be judged as more than a rotating talking shop, closing this gap must become an early priority, and India, with its formidable administrative capacity, is well placed to make the case.
Equally structural is BRICS’s commitment to consensus-based decision-making. It is, in one sense, the grouping’s great democratic virtue — no member, however small, can be steamrolled. But it is also its great operational constraint, since unanimity is a slow and fragile currency to spend on urgent problems. The bloc’s inability, despite years of discussion, to arrive at a shared position on Security Council reform is a case in point: consensus protects sovereignty, but it can just as easily protect paralysis.
Then there is the perennial talk of de-dollarisation — the ambition, loudly voiced by some members, to reduce dependence on the US dollar in cross-border trade. Here India has counselled realism over rhetoric. Currency convertibility, capital-market depth and macroeconomic structures vary enormously across the grouping; a gradual diversification of trade settlement is a defensible goal, but a symbolic announcement untethered from economic fact would satisfy headlines more than households. India’s caution on this front — like its caution on the pace of further expansion — reflects a diplomatic instinct that prizes durability over drama.
Finally, expansion itself has imported new complications along with new legitimacy. Bringing in members from different regions has widened BRICS’s representativeness, but it has also imported regional rivalries into its decision-making — including, most visibly, the continuing tensions between India and China. Size, in other words, is not the same thing as strength. Unless matched by deeper institutional trust, a larger BRICS risks becoming a harder BRICS to move.
What India Alone Can Offer
It is precisely here that India’s peculiar diplomatic position becomes an asset rather than a liability. India may be the only BRICS member that simultaneously maintains deep strategic partnerships with Western democracies, sustains a long historical relationship with Russia, expands its footprint across the Global South, and keeps channels of dialogue open with China despite unresolved friction. No other member state occupies quite so many rooms at once.
This is the quiet argument behind India’s insistence that BRICS remain a platform for construction rather than confrontation. New Delhi’s foreign policy has never been organised around an adversary; it has been organised around outcomes. That is why India can sit comfortably within BRICS while simultaneously deepening the Quad, the G20 and its Indo-Pacific partnerships — not as contradictions to be explained away, but as evidence of a considered belief that the coming international order will be built through overlapping coalitions, not exclusive blocs.
And the substance India brings to this presidency is not theoretical. Its own developmental journey — Aadhaar, UPI, CoWIN, Digital India, the rapid scaling of renewable energy — offers a template that speaks directly to the aspirations of the Global South: technology deployed not as spectacle, but as a tool for inclusion at population scale. This is a currency India can offer that few others can — proof, drawn from its own recent history, that development and democracy are not opposing forces but reinforcing ones.
Conclusion: A Coalition Learning to Lead
The story of BRICS across these twenty years is, at heart, a story about how ideas outgrow their origins. An acronym built for a research note became a summit; a summit became an institution; an institution is now, under India’s stewardship, being asked to become something closer to a community of shared purpose.
India’s 2026 presidency will not be remembered for the number of declarations it produces or the number of new members it welcomes. Its legacy — if it is to have one — will rest on whether it can convert the raw demographic and economic weight of BRICS into outcomes that are felt in ordinary lives: more resilient supply chains, more accessible technology, cleaner growth, a fairer hearing for nations too long spoken over rather than spoken with.
There is a phrase worth holding onto here, one that captures the deeper argument of India’s presidency better than any communiqué could: true leadership is measured not by the ability to dominate a room, but by the ability to hold one together. If the first twenty years of BRICS were spent proving that the emerging world mattered, the next twenty must be spent proving that it can lead. In that sense, the trajectory of BRICS and the trajectory of modern India have quietly become the same story — a passage from potential to purpose, from participant to architect. What India chooses to build in this single year at the helm may well determine whether that passage continues.
By: DEEPAKSHI JINDAL
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