BRICS 2026 in New Delhi: How India Is Hosting a Bloc It Doesn't Fully Control

India is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12 and 13, its fourth time chairing the group and the biggest yet, with 11 full members and 10 partner countries attending. The event puts Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a delicate position: leading a bloc built partly around resistance to Western dominance, while trying not to damage India's own relationships with the United States and Europe.

BRICS started in 2009 as a simple acronym for four countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. South Africa joined two years later, and for over a decade the group stayed at five members, largely symbolic, mostly about signalling that emerging economies deserved a bigger seat at the table. That changed fast. In 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE were added. Indonesia followed in January 2025. Today BRICS has **11 full members and 10 partner countries**, together representing roughly half the world's population and a major share of global economic output.

That growth is exactly what makes hosting the group so complicated this year. The original five countries mostly agreed on the basics, wanting more influence over global institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The expanded version is far messier. It now includes countries with direct rivalries sitting at the same table: India and China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia. Getting all of them to agree on a joint statement, let alone a coordinated policy, is a genuinely hard diplomatic task, and it's the one India has taken on as this year's chair.

The optics of the summit tell their own story. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in New Delhi on Friday, his second visit to meet Modi in under two weeks. Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to attend too, marking his first trip to India in seven years, a visit widely seen as part of a slow thaw in relations that had been frozen since deadly border clashes in 2020. Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian is also attending, along with representatives from Brazil, South Africa, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and several other member and partner states.

Hosting all of them at once forces India to walk a careful line. New Delhi has spent the last two years deepening ties with the United States and Europe, while also trying to keep its older, more complicated relationships with Russia and China from breaking down. The war in Ukraine adds another layer of tension: China and Russia have shown support for Iran in international forums, while India has taken a far more cautious, neutral stance throughout. Notably, Xi is expected to travel from New Delhi directly to Washington later this month for talks with President Trump, a scheduling detail that underlines how every country in this bloc is simultaneously playing its own separate game with the West.

Beneath the diplomatic balancing act, India has a fairly concrete agenda for the summit. Officials have pointed to five priority areas: strengthening supply chains, expanding trade and cross-border payment systems, cooperating on technology and artificial intelligence, securing energy partnerships, and pushing for reform of global institutions so developing countries get more representation. Discussions on clean energy and financing for sustainable growth are also expected to feature heavily, alongside cooperation on counter-terrorism and cyber security, an area Modi has pushed since meeting BRICS security officials earlier this year.

The summit's official theme, "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability," reflects this practical focus, but the bigger story is really about what BRICS represents now versus what it started as. It is no longer a small club of large emerging economies quietly asking for more say. It is a sprawling, ideologically mixed coalition that includes US allies and US rivals sitting in the same room, all nominally united by a shared frustration with how global power is currently distributed. Whether that shared frustration is enough to produce real, coordinated outcomes, rather than just a joint photograph and a long communique, is the real test India faces as host this weekend. For a country trying to be a bridge between the West and the Global South at the same time, this summit is as much a test of that balancing act as it is a diplomatic milestone.