BRICS 2026 Under Fire: Can India Turn Global Turbulence into Strategic Cohesion?
Backdrop
“BRICS 2026 meets at Bharat Mandapam at precisely the moment when the world order is under maximum stress. Ukraine, Iran, US tariffs, China, energy security and competing visions of multipolarity are converging at India’s doorstep. The real test is no longer whether BRICS can speak together—but whether India can make it act together”.
BRICS 2026: From Aspiration to the Test of Reality
When I wrote “BRICS at Twenty: India’s Moment to Turn Aspiration into Architecture” (included in BRICS Information Portal, Link below) in August, the central question was whether India could use its 2026 Chairmanship to convert the growing weight of BRICS into practical institutional architecture without allowing the grouping to become an anti-Western bloc.
As the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam approaches on 12–13 September, that question has become considerably more difficult—and more consequential.
The international environment has deteriorated rapidly. The Russia-Ukraine war continues; the US-Israel-Iran confrontation has transformed West Asian security and energy calculations; the threat of punitive US tariffs against countries purchasing Russian energy directly affects major BRICS economies; and the India-China relationship is simultaneously showing cautious signs of stabilisation after years of tension.
The forthcoming Modi-Putin meeting adds another important dimension. The Russian President is expected in New Delhi ahead of the Summit, with defence, energy, trade and technology among the issues attracting attention. The meeting comes at a time when India is under pressure over its continued engagement with Russian energy while simultaneously seeking to preserve its wider strategic partnerships.
Iran will also enter the BRICS discussion with expectations that India will go beyond general expressions of concern and support a stronger collective response to the US-Israeli military campaign. Tehran has already urged BRICS members to explicitly condemn what it describes as US-Israeli aggression.
Yet this is precisely where India’s balancing challenge becomes acute. The BRICS table also includes Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose security calculations have been profoundly affected by the conflict and by Iranian attacks on Gulf states and shipping. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have strongly condemned Iranian attacks and asserted their right to defend their sovereignty and security.
Thus, unlike a conventional alliance, BRICS cannot simply adopt one member’s geopolitical narrative. The same organisation contains countries seeking condemnation of US-Israeli action, countries directly exposed to Iranian military action, Russia seeking relief from Western pressure, China pursuing a larger role in an emerging alternative architecture, and India seeking strategic autonomy without bloc confrontation.
The SCO Summit has already provided India with a useful diplomatic template. Its handling of the Iran crisis demonstrated that a diverse grouping can register opposition to military action and reaffirm multipolarity while leaving room for individual members to maintain their own strategic relationships. The BRICS challenge, however, is more complex because its expanded membership has imported sharper regional and geopolitical contradictions.
The following analysis examines whether India’s calibrated activism can convert this turbulence into greater BRICS cohesion—or whether the very forces that have increased BRICS’s geopolitical importance will expose its internal limits.
The test at Bharat Mandapam is therefore larger than another summit declaration. It is a test of whether India can help BRICS become what it should be: non-Western, but not anti-Western; strategically autonomous, but not strategically confrontational; and increasingly capable of converting the aspirations of the Global South into practical institutional outcomes.
Sharing my Analysis published in many international websites in different forms along with a video explainer with express.
GLOBAL TURBULENCE AND THE TESTING OF BRICS 2026
India’s Balancing Act at Bharat Mandapam
Major General (Dr) S B Asthana, SM, VSM (Retd)
| EXTRACT India’s 2026 BRICS Chairmanship culminates at Bharat Mandapam amid a rare convergence of crises – a Russia-Ukraine war without end, an Iran-Israel-US confrontation, punitive US tariff legislation aimed at Russian oil buyers, and a cautiously thawing Sino-Indian relationship and narrative post SCO 2026.. Far from derailing the Summit, this turbulence has become its defining test: whether New Delhi can convert calibrated activism into durable cohesion for a grouping built on reform, not confrontation. |
Introduction
Rarely has a BRICS Chairmanship arrived amid so much simultaneous turbulence. As India prepares to host the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam on 12-13 September 2026, under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” the grouping finds itself navigating a Russia-Ukraine war that refuses to end, an Iran-Israel-US crisis that has already claimed the life of Iran’s Supreme Leader, a US Congress moving to weaponise tariffs against Russian oil buyers, a Sino-Indian relationship only cautiously thawing after years of border tension and outcome of SCO 2026. Global turbulence, in other words, is not merely the backdrop to BRICS 2026; it has become the agenda.
A Sequence Not of India’s Choosing, But to India’s Advantage: Impact of SCO 2026!
The 26th SCO Summit at Bishkek, held barely ten days before Bharat Mandapam, has effectively become a dress rehearsal for BRICS. The Bishkek Declaration condemned the US-Israel strikes on Iran, mourned the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, backed a just settlement on Palestine, and reaffirmed a “representative, democratic and equitable multipolar world order.” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian personally asked Prime Minister Modi, in his capacity as incoming BRICS Chair, to help build a common position against US-Israeli military action. Since BRICS contains Iran alongside the more US-aligned UAE and Saudi Arabia, the same fault line that surfaced at Bishkek will resurface, in sharper form, at the BRICS table.
Yet the sequencing works in India’s favour rather than against it. Having already co-signed Bishkek’s language on multipolarity and non-discriminatory trade, New Delhi arrives at its own Summit with a tested template for balancing Global South solidarity against its own strategic autonomy vis-à-vis Washington. Over 350 preparatory meetings across 25-plus cities this year testify to a chairmanship that has been methodical rather than reactive – the diplomatic equivalent of India’s subtraction and addition strategy: subtracting friction points before they harden into disputes, while adding areas of convergence the grouping can act upon together.
The Tariff Weapon and the Limits of Collective Retaliation
The most immediate turbulence is economic. The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, passed by the US Senate, authorises tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the largest importers of Russian oil and gas – a measure that would strike directly at India, China and, depending on final designation, Brazil. It is legislation dressed as Ukraine policy but built, as several US analysts have noted, to double as general-purpose tariff leverage against precisely the economies BRICS represents.
Can BRICS respond as a bloc? The economics counsel caution. Intra-BRICS merchandise trade runs at roughly USD 700-800 billion annually, against combined BRICS trade with the US and EU exceeding USD 5 trillion. No BRICS economy, including China’s, is prepared to sacrifice Western market access for bloc solidarity. What the tariff threat can do, paradoxically, is accelerate what internal diplomacy has struggled to achieve: greater coordination on payment systems, supply chains and financial cooperation, precisely because external coercion, when it targets multiple members simultaneously, narrows the space for free-riding. The lesson for BRICS is unambiguous – intra-BRICS trade must expand substantially if the grouping is to develop genuine resilience against an economic hegemon acting alone.
Xi’s Possible Visit and the China Variable
Adding to the turbulence is the prospect of Xi Jinping’s first visit to India since 2019, pre-dating the deadly Galwan clash of 2020. A delegation of some 400 officials is reportedly being readied, even as reports of a fresh border friction point complicate the atmospherics and India’s top security official has been in Beijing for talks. If the visit materialises, it will be read globally as a signal that the India-China relationship is entering a phase of competitive coexistence rather than open confrontation – correct diplomacy for both capitals, given that neither benefits from a permanently frozen bilateral track feeding into a wider “Cold War 2.0” narrative that neither India nor China wishes to be boxed into.
This matters for BRICS because the China-India contradiction remains, as I have argued elsewhere, the grouping’s most consequential internal tension. Beijing increasingly treats BRICS as a pillar of an alternative architecture reducing Western influence; New Delhi insists on a genuinely multipolar Asia rather than a China-centric one, and on BRICS as a reform platform rather than an anti-Western instrument. A cordial Modi-Xi meeting at the margins of Bharat Mandapam would not resolve that contradiction, but it would demonstrate that BRICS’s consensus-based model can still accommodate rival visions without capsizing – itself a form of concirclement, in which India manages competing power centres around it rather than being encircled by their rivalries.
| “BRICS should evolve as a platform that enhances strategic and economic resilience without getting into bloc politics.” — Maj Gen (Dr) S B Asthana |
Energy Security: The Silent Common Thread
Running beneath the geopolitics is a shared, less discussed vulnerability – energy security. Any escalation that threatens the Strait of Hormuz strikes directly at India’s oil import bill and inflation, and at similar exposures across China, and much of the Global South that BRICS claims to represent. The Bishkek statements on energy cooperation and India’s own MoUs on climate and connectivity are not separate from this turbulence; they are hedges against it. Chabahar Port, discussed in Prime Minister Modi’s sideline meeting with Iran’s President, and India’s continued, calibrated purchase of discounted Russian crude despite tariff threats, both reflect the same underlying calculus: energy security first, ideological alignment a distant second.
Calibrated Activism as the Only Viable Course
None of this turbulence is likely to derail the Summit’s declared, deliberately non-controversial themes of resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. The harder question is whether members will stay within those bounds once they are in the room together, given how many of them arrive carrying grievances – Iran’s demand for solidarity against the US and Israel, Russia’s search for sanctions relief, and China’s institutional ambitions for BRICS as counterweight to the West all sit uneasily against India’s preference for a reform-not-confrontation agenda.
India’s answer has to be calibrated activism: firm enough to hold the chair’s agenda together, restrained enough not to let BRICS be captured by any single member’s confrontation with the West. This is consistent with New Delhi’s parallel engagement with the G20, the Quad and the SCO – competitive coexistence with all major poles rather than exclusive alignment with any one of them.
“India’s answer has to be calibrated activism.”
— Major General (Dr) S B Asthana
Conclusion
BRICS at twenty was already navigating internal contradictions of size, ideology and economic asymmetry. BRICS in 2026 must do so while absorbing external shocks – war, assassination, tariff coercion and great-power rivalry – arriving almost simultaneously. That the grouping’s chair this year is a nation practised in balancing exactly these pressures, and that its Summit follows so closely on the SCO’s own test of the same balancing act, is more opportunity than accident. Whether Bharat Mandapam converts turbulence into cohesion, or merely papers over it for another year, will depend on India’s ability to keep BRICS anchored to its founding purpose: reform of an unrepresentative global order, not participation in a new bloc confrontation. That, ultimately, is the measure by which this Chairmanship – and this Summit – should be judged.
“The goal is neither confrontation with existing institutions nor their replacement — BRICS should be non-Western, but not anti-Western.” Asthana
Related articles by the author on the subject
My article on BRICS Information Portal
https://infobrics.org/en/post/102968
https://theraisinahills.com/brics-india-bridge-global-south-geopolitics-2026
WHY THIS MATTERS
BRICS 2026 is no longer simply another summit of emerging economies.
It is becoming a test of whether a larger and more diverse Global South grouping can retain strategic relevance while its members face radically different security and economic pressures.
For India, the challenge is particularly demanding:
- Russia wants strategic relevance and relief from Western economic pressure.
- Iran wants stronger international condemnation of US-Israeli military action.
- Saudi Arabia and the UAE want regional security, sovereignty and protection of energy and maritime infrastructure.
- China wants BRICS to become an important pillar of a more diversified global architecture.
- Brazil, South Africa and other Global South members want stronger representation, development finance and institutional reform.
- Washington will closely watch whether India allows BRICS to become an anti-Western platform.
India therefore has to perform a difficult balancing act: keep BRICS united without allowing it to become a bloc.
THE SIX QUESTIONS TO WATCH AT BHARAT MANDAPAM
1. Will BRICS condemn the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran?
2. Can India prevent the Iran–Gulf divide from paralysing BRICS consensus?
3. Will Modi-Putin discussions reinforce India’s strategic autonomy?
4. Can India and China maintain competitive coexistence within BRICS?
5. Can BRICS move beyond declarations towards practical economic resilience?
6. Will India be able to pull out a joint statement?
About the Author
Major General (Dr) S B Asthana, SM, VSM, PhD (Veteran)
The views expressed are the personal views of the author, who retains copyright. The author is a globally acknowledged strategic and security analyst, and former Director General of Infantry, Indian Army, and former Director at the United Service Institution of India. A prolific strategic-affairs commentator with over 600 published works and more than 5,000 global TV appearances, he writes on geopolitics, military doctrine and Indian defence policy.
asthanawrites.org | LinkedIn | YouTube: @GenAsthanaAnalyses
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