India pushes for bigger role in BRICS while it aims to avoid damaging ties with US

The BRICS summit that ended in New Delhi on Sunday produced no military alliance, common currency, or unified anti-Western front. It did, however, produce a 140-paragraph declaration showing how a group of countries with sharply different interests is trying to create greater room for emerging economies to shape the rules governing trade, finance, technology and international institutions. 

For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.org

The 18th BRICS Summit, held on September 12 and 13 under India’s chairmanship, brought together the bloc’s 10 confirmed full members - Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia - with Saudi Arabia counted as an 11th by Indian and BRICS official sources despite Riyadh's own more cautious diplomatic language. 

BRICS is expanding, but it is not becoming a conventional alliance. Its members include US partners such as India and the UAE, sanctioned powers such as Russia and Iran, and China, Washington’s principal strategic competitor. Their political systems, security interests, and economic models differ substantially. Yet New Delhi demonstrated that it can increasingly find common ground around a narrower demand: greater influence over the rules of the international system. 

The New Delhi Declaration criticized tariff and non-tariff barriers and other coercive economic measures, called for more resilient supply chains, backed efforts to expand cross-border payments and trade settlement in local currencies, and pressed for reforms to institutions ranging from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization. It also placed artificial intelligence, critical minerals and higher-value manufacturing near the center of the bloc’s development agenda.

For India, the summit was about more than hosting an enlarged BRICS. It was an opportunity to demonstrate that strategic autonomy can itself become a form of leadership.

Rajat Ganguly, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs and the Journal of World Affairs: Voice of the Global South, said the summit elevated India’s position within the grouping. “One big takeaway from this BRICS summit, as I see it … is a very distinctive style of Indian foreign policy. And this very distinctive style is very different from China, very different from other countries,” he told The Media Line.

He described the approach as the “India way,” emphasizing sovereignty and diplomacy while resisting pressure to align with competing blocs.

“What is the India way? If you look at all the resolutions, all the discussions, the things that Modi said, one very big part of this is that India is clearly saying that 21st-century international relations have to move away from naked power politics, unilateral moves, using military power at the drop of a hat,” he said.

That formulation reflects the unusual position New Delhi has built for itself. India remains a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the “Quad,” alongside the United States, Japan, and Australia, and in February formally joined Pax Silica, the US-led initiative covering critical minerals, semiconductor manufacturing, AI infrastructure, and technology supply chains. At the same time, New Delhi maintains close defense and economic relations with Russia, participates in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, retains extensive ties with Israel, and continues to engage Iran. 

Ganguly describes this not as non-alignment in its older form, but as poly-alignment. “We say anybody who wants to come and give me a hug, I’m happy to give you a hug. But India will always decide based on India’s interest.”

That flexibility was visible in New Delhi. The summit succeeded in adopting a consensus declaration despite serious divisions among members over the Middle East. Iran and the UAE, positioned very differently in the confrontation involving Washington and Tehran, both accepted language calling for restraint, dialogue, and diplomacy, while their leaders also held a high-level meeting on the sidelines.

The outcome allowed India to present BRICS not as a vehicle for replacing one hegemon with another, but as a forum in which states that disagree on security can still coordinate around economic and institutional interests.

China, Russia's roles in BRICS

China, however, brings a different strategic weight to the grouping.

Yang Xiaotong, a researcher at the Beijing-based think tank Horizon Insights Centre, said China sees BRICS as part of a broad shift but not as a formal anti-American coalition. “By signing the BRICS New Delhi Declaration, China and other BRICS members are positioning the bloc as an alternative to a US-led unipolar world order, in which Washington no longer can impose unilateral tariffs and sanctions at a whim,” Yang told The Media Line.

“Beijing has no intention of dividing the world into camps; rather, it is content with countries hedging between China and the US - which suggests they can be persuaded to stay neutral should conflict break out between the two powers,” he said.

That interpretation helps explain one of BRICS’ central contradictions: some of its members are simultaneously embedded in US-led economic or security structures. Yang pointed specifically to the UAE, which remains closely connected to Washington and is also a participant in Pax Silica.

“This is why the UAE, for example - which maintains close ties with Washington and belongs to the US-led Pax Silica initiative aimed at restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductors and slowing its AI development - has also been welcomed into the bloc.”

Washington’s official description of Pax Silica is broader: a supply-chain and technology-security initiative spanning critical minerals, energy, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI and infrastructure. The UAE officially joined in January, while India followed in February. Its participation in both Pax Silica and BRICS illustrates why the latter is difficult to treat as a straightforward adversarial camp.

Beijing is nonetheless seeking to deepen BRICS’ economic and technological coordination. In New Delhi, Xi Jinping pushed a “Greater BRICS” agenda that included proposals on artificial intelligence, special economic zones and services trade, reinforcing China’s attempt to place technology and industrial cooperation alongside traditional diplomacy at the center of the bloc.

Russia, meanwhile, approaches BRICS from a more explicitly economic and geopolitical angle.

Putin used his New Delhi visit to call for the grouping to become a more practical economic force focused on technology, infrastructure, investment, and payment mechanisms less vulnerable to external restrictions. For Moscow, BRICS also provides access to large non-Western economies at a time when sanctions have narrowed many of Russia’s traditional financial and diplomatic channels.

Even here, however, the picture is more nuanced than a simple campaign to replace the dollar. Days before the summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was not seeking “de-dollarization” as an objective in itself and remained open to different payment methods. The New Delhi Declaration similarly stopped short of endorsing a common BRICS currency. Instead, it backed work on interoperability between payment and messaging systems and on greater use of members’ local currencies, while explicitly acknowledging that there is “no one-size-fits-all approach.”

BRICS is currently building alternatives to the existing financial system, not replacing it. Its most established institution, the New Development Bank, has approved around $43 billion in financing since its creation. That gives BRICS a functioning development finance mechanism even as broader monetary integration remains limited.

Challenge for America

For Washington, this presents a more complicated challenge than a simple hostile bloc.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly portrayed BRICS as hostile to US interests. In July 2025, he threatened an additional 10% tariff on countries aligning with what he called the grouping’s “anti-American policies,” without precisely defining what would constitute such alignment.

Willian I., an adviser at the US Department of State, cautioned against interpreting Modi’s message as evidence that India or BRICS is announcing a structural break with the West. “Well, I don't see, in Modi's speech, a structural rupture in how the West conducts foreign policy. I see a request for a seat at the table, not an announcement that the table is closing,” he told The Media Line.

He also argued that the absence of a specific new US response to the New Delhi summit should not be confused with a retreat from Washington’s existing position toward the bloc.

“The BRICS final declaration rejects unilateral sanctions and coercive tariffs, but so far, the Trump administration hasn't issued a specific statement on this New Delhi summit. That doesn't mean retreat. The pattern I've been tracking is the opposite, with the White House maintaining the position that any country aligned with the bloc's agenda, including de-dollarization, will face additional tariffs, something already stated explicitly after the Rio summit in July 2025,” he noted.

For Willian, the more consequential question is not whether Western deterrence is disappearing, but whether maintaining economic coercion becomes increasingly costly as BRICS expands its economic weight. “I think that variable, the rising cost of sustaining that coercion as BRICS's economic weight grows, matters more for understanding this moment than any reading that the era of Western deterrence is ending,” he said.

India’s own caution, he argued, also reveals one of the principal structural limits facing BRICS. “… India itself, as host of the summit, avoided turning the bloc into an explicitly anti-American front, which to me is the clearest sign that internal heterogeneity within the Global South remains the biggest limit on Modi's project,” he observed.

Yet India exposes the limits of framing BRICS itself as a uniformly anti-American project. New Delhi is simultaneously seeking greater influence within an organization that challenges aspects of Western dominance while deepening cooperation with Washington on semiconductors, AI, critical minerals, and strategic technologies.

India-China relationship adds another contradiction 

Modi and Xi used the summit to continue a cautious thaw after years of tensions following the 2020 Himalayan border clash. They agreed to work on strengthening commercial and transport ties and further stabilizing bilateral relations. Yet the underlying imbalance remains substantial.

Bilateral trade reached a record $155.6 billion in 2025, while India imported roughly $132 billion from China, highlighting a structural deficit New Delhi has repeatedly sought to reduce. The border dispute also remains unresolved despite the easing of military tensions and the resumption of several bilateral exchanges.

India is therefore trying to increase its political weight inside a bloc in which China remains the much larger manufacturing power and the dominant actor in several critical supply chains. That competition is one reason New Delhi’s leadership ambitions cannot be separated from economics.

Critical minerals are a central example. The declaration called for reliable, diversified and resilient critical-mineral supply chains while stressing that resource-rich countries should capture more value domestically, diversify their economies and retain sovereign control over their resources.

China remains the dominant actor in the rare earth elements market. US Geological Survey data indicate that China accounts for more than 70% of global rare-earth extraction and approximately 87% of processing, giving Beijing leverage far beyond simply possessing mineral reserves.

But BRICS’ mineral relevance extends beyond China. Its membership includes major commodity, mineral, and energy producers across several continents. The strategic question is no longer who possesses the ore. It is who refines it, who finances the infrastructure, who controls processing technology, and which economies capture the higher-value stages of production.

That is where the rare-earth and AI debates increasingly converge. The technology contest runs through an entire industrial chain: critical minerals feed advanced manufacturing; advanced manufacturing supports semiconductors; semiconductors underpin data centers and computing capacity; and computing capacity determines how rapidly countries can build and deploy artificial intelligence.

The New Delhi Declaration effectively addresses both ends of that chain. It calls for greater value addition and economic diversification in resource-rich countries, while also pushing for wider access to AI resources and greater cooperation on safe and trustworthy AI, particularly for the Global South.

For developing economies, the issue is not only access to natural resources or technology. It is whether they remain primarily suppliers of raw materials and consumers of technologies developed elsewhere, or move into processing, manufacturing, infrastructure, and eventually the higher-value AI economy.

India again occupies an unusual middle position.

Through Pax Silica, it is working with the United States across what the initiative calls the “silicon stack,” stretching from critical minerals and advanced manufacturing to semiconductors and AI infrastructure. Through BRICS, New Delhi is simultaneously demanding broader access to technology and a stronger role for emerging economies in writing the rules governing those technologies.

The economic scale behind that argument is increasingly difficult to dismiss. BRICS now represents more than 40% of the world’s population and a significant share of global output, while its members control major shares of commodity, energy, and manufacturing capacity.

But the grouping remains deeply heterogeneous.

Ganguly sees the broader trend not as the disappearance of American influence, but as a redistribution of power. “So, America as the sole superpower, those days are finished. Russia’s power is growing, China’s power is growing, India’s power is growing,” he said.

“I’m not saying America will be finished or America will not have any power. No, no. America will be a big power. But America will be a big power amongst many other big powers. So, there will be at least three, four, five, six big powers. So, there’ll be a power redistribution.”

The second layer of that transition, he argued, is the growing political weight of the Global South. “Increasingly, the Global South will have more say, more voice, more decision-making in setting the rules of the game,” Ganguly said. “The time has come that we will not be just a rule follower, but we will be the rule setter.”