Opinion: Opinion | BRICS Has Grown Up. Now It Must Behave Like An Adult

The India-China accommodation will be a key driver of the grouping, but a 'non-Western' agenda will work well only if it focuses on ending global conflict as much as on stabilising the global economy.
The BRICS summit that India hosts this year is its fourth, with the fifth opportunity not coming for a decade. That alone should make us pause. This is a grouping that began life in 2001 as a clever acronym coined by a Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O'Neill, to sell emerging markets to investors. The summits followed from 2009. In its eighteenth year, the question worth asking is a simple one: is BRICS ready to grow up?

In some ways, it clearly is. What started as an investment thesis is now a premier emerging-market forum with summit-level heft. Like every serious economic gathering in a disorderly world, it has encountered geopolitics, exactly as the G20 did. The proof is in the action. Over 350 meetings in the run-up to the summit, and the outcomes catalogued. The last one in Rio produced a declaration running to 126 paragraphs, sweeping across trade, climate, technology, humanitarian concerns, and global governance. A club that issues a 126-paragraph communique signed off by heads of state and government is no longer a niche investors' huddle.

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It has also grown in girth. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have joined the founding five. Every new member bar Ethiopia is a Muslim-majority country, which could read as a tilt, yet the truth runs the other way. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Ethiopia are, for strategic reasons, in no hurry to pick fights with the West. With them inside the tent, India has more elbow room to keep BRICS from hardening into an anti-Western caucus. A wider BRICS is, counterintuitively, a more moderate one.

None of this means the club is in good working order. Its challenges are real and worth naming plainly:

• China's weight. With the largest economy in the room, BRICS risks being read as a Beijing-led vehicle, which is why most members resist Sino-centric agendas like a common currency.
• The India-China strategic rivalry. The current summit comes at a time of tactical accommodation between the two Asian giants. Much of the BRICS dynamic will depend on how sustained a positive India-China economic relationship can be.
• Thin consensus. Eleven members pull in eleven directions, and Rio's 126 paragraphs papered over as much as they settled.
• The de-dollarisation mirage. There is no workable common currency and no obvious anchor, only a patchwork of local-currency deals.
• The anti-West trap. Pushed too hard against the West, BRICS forfeits its usefulness and invites retaliation.
• No spine. Eighteen years in, it still has no secretariat, no home, and no one in charge between the summits.

Take the fear that most animates Washington: de-dollarisation. It is neither India's agenda nor Brazil's, and it remains a long way off. A common currency is a fantasy, and the yuan is no anchor, which leaves a slow diffusion of trade into local currencies, including the rupee, as the likelier path. As for the anxiety in the US Treasury, a little of it does no harm. It costs nothing and concentrates minds.

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Here is the real argument. If BRICS is coming of age, it must behave like an adult, and that means building institutions. For eighteen years, it has met, declaimed, and dispersed, with no permanent address, no professional staff, and no one whose full-time job is to turn summit rhetoric into follow-through. It needs a secretariat, a home city, and a secretary-general. Meeting for the form is easy. Meeting for substantive outcomes requires machinery between the summits, someone to track commitments, nurse the local-currency plumbing along, and prepare the ground so that leaders arrive to decide rather than to discover.

India could lead this. As a founding member, it could offer New Delhi (or Goa!) as the home of BRICS and put forward the first secretary-general. This is a structural role, and India can hold the group's contradictions together in a way no other member can. India chaired the G20 in 2023 and BRICS in 2026, in close succession, sitting precisely at the intersection of the established economies of the G7 and the rising powers of the BRICS core. The G7, for its part, would do well to reinvent itself as a wider club of industrial democracies, with India, Australia, and South Korea at the table. An institution with a spine could do more than draft communiques. With the Gulf, Iran, and Africa now inside the tent, a steadier BRICS could lend its weight to quiet peacemaking, stepping in where Western forums are stalemated, and give the global economy a stabilising, confidently non-Western voice.

None of this is to pretend that BRICS is a model of unity. It will lack unanimity for years. Yet, even a fractious BRICS, enlarged and growing, can both challenge and supplement Western groupings. It reminds the old order that the rest of the world has options, and pushes towards a fairer, more just multipolarity. Eighteen is the age of adulthood in much of the world, when you get the vote, the responsibility, and the expectation that you will stop drifting and start deciding. BRICS has spent its youth gathering members and issuing declarations.

With India's steady hand to guide it, the club should now grow into an institution: more active in peacemaking, and, with a confident alternative-to-the-West agenda of advancing the global economy.

(Ajay Bisaria is a former diplomat and distinguished fellow at Observer Research Foundation)