India BRICS Summit 2026: A Strategic Report

The 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi was not a routine gathering. The moment that mattered was a sidelines meeting between Iran and the UAE, weeks after they had been striking each other's infrastructure.

The 18th BRICS Summit, held in New Delhi on September 12 and 13, 2026, was never going to be a routine gathering. It convened 11 member nations, several of them locked in active regional conflict with each other, at a moment when a US and Israeli military campaign against Iran, ongoing tariff wars launched by Washington, and the still-unresolved war in Ukraine were all running in parallel.

Against that backdrop, the single most consequential moment of the summit was not a speech or a photograph. It was a quiet sidelines meeting between the presidents of Iran and the United Arab Emirates, two countries that had been firing missiles and drones at each other's infrastructure only weeks earlier, sitting down face to face for the first time since their conflict began.

This report goes beyond the headline declaration to examine that meeting, the other bilateral diplomacy happening in parallel, the specific economic and geopolitical topics on the table, and how the summit was read by the non-BRICS world — particularly Washington, watching from outside the room.

The backdrop

To understand why this particular BRICS summit carried so much more tension than most of its predecessors, it helps to look at what was happening in the world in the months leading up to it.

Since late February 2026, Iran had been at war with the United States and Israel. The conflict, which Iranian officials describe as beginning around February 28, saw the US and Israel launch military strikes against Iranian targets, with Tehran retaliating against American allies in the region. That retaliation eventually spread into the Gulf directly. Iran launched ballistic missiles and drones against the United Arab Emirates, damaging energy infrastructure and ports, and relations between Tehran and Abu Dhabi hit what one report called a genuine breaking point after two Iranian ballistic missiles splashed into waters near the UAE coastline, prompting the Emirates to impose a sweeping, indefinite embargo in response.

Strikes on commercial vessels, including oil tankers operated by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, followed in the Strait of Hormuz. Just one day before the summit opened, Saudi Arabia was forced to shut a major East-West oil pipeline after it was attacked by drones, intensifying global concern about further energy supply disruption right as BRICS leaders, many of them heavily dependent on Gulf and Iranian energy, were arriving in New Delhi.

Layered on top of this was the economic pressure coming from Washington. President Trump had spent much of the year threatening additional tariffs on countries he accused of aligning with what he called BRICS's "anti-American policies," specifically targeting any moves by the bloc toward reducing reliance on the US dollar. His pressure campaign on buyers of Russian oil, aimed squarely at India and China, added another layer of friction, forcing both countries to balance their economic relationship with Washington against their energy relationships with Moscow. And the war in Ukraine, now well into its fourth year, continued to sit uneasily inside a bloc that includes Russia as a founding member and several Western-aligned economies as newer members.

In short, BRICS arrived in New Delhi not as a group quietly discussing long-term development goals, but as a coalition whose members were, in several cases, directly involved in or affected by three overlapping global conflicts at once. That is the context in which India, as host and chair, had to somehow produce a unanimous joint statement.

Who was in the room

Eleven full BRICS members sent representation to New Delhi: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. Not every country sent its head of state. Brazil, notably, was represented by Foreign Affairs Minister Mauro Vieira rather than President Lula da Silva, a contrast to Lula's prominent, outspoken role at the previous year's Rio summit, where he had personally criticised NATO military spending increases from the summit stage. South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa attended in person, as did New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff and Ugandan Vice President Jessica Alupo as part of the broader outreach dimension.

The three arrivals that mattered most, diplomatically, were Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Masoud Pezeshkian. Putin's presence marked his first in-person appearance at a BRICS summit hosted outside Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, a logistically and politically significant trip given the international arrest warrant hanging over him. Xi Jinping's visit was his first to India in seven years, and notably the first time since becoming China's leader in 2012 that he had skipped exactly zero BRICS summits until this point in his tenure, a streak worth mentioning because just one year earlier, at the 2025 Rio summit, he had broken that pattern and stayed home. His decision to travel to New Delhi in 2026 was read by many analysts as a deliberate signal that Beijing wanted this particular summit, and this particular relationship with India, treated as a priority. Pezeshkian's attendance was arguably the boldest of the three, given that he was arriving directly from a country still at war, into a room that also included Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two governments with sharply different regional interests than Tehran's.

Notably absent from the guest list, in a structural sense, was any representation for the United States, which is not a BRICS member but whose policies shaped nearly every conversation that happened inside Bharat Mandapam regardless. As one analysis put it plainly in the lead-up to the summit, Trump might not have been sitting at the table, but his shadow was hard to miss.

Friday, September 11

A full day before the summit's formal opening, Putin arrived in New Delhi for bilateral talks with Modi, their second meeting in under two weeks following an earlier encounter at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek. The two leaders covered civil nuclear energy, fertilisers, defence, critical minerals, manufacturing, railways, and steel, alongside discussions of cross-border payment systems. Separately, Modi also met with Pezeshkian that same day, their second meeting in under two weeks as well, following their own Bishkek encounter. of that conversation, Modi told the Iranian president that India supported efforts toward a lasting peace, a message consistent with New Delhi's public stance throughout the West Asia conflict.

The Iran-UAE meeting

Saturday was, by a wide margin, the most consequential day of the summit, and arguably the most consequential single day BRICS has produced in its 18-summit history. The day opened with ceremonial warmth. Modi hosted arriving leaders with what Indian media described as genuine bonhomie, sharing public moments with Putin and Xi as the summit formally began. Behind that ceremony, however, three separate and highly consequential bilateral tracks were unfolding simultaneously.

The Pezeshkian–Al Nahyan meeting was the single most striking development of the day, and arguably of the entire summit. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met on the sidelines of the summit, marking their first known face-to-face interaction since the West Asia war began in February. Given the missile strikes, the drone attacks, and the indefinite embargo that had defined Iran-UAE relations for the preceding months, the mere fact of this meeting happening was treated as a genuine diplomatic surprise.

According to the Abu Dhabi media office, the two leaders discussed regional and international issues of mutual interest and stressed the need to ease tensions, promote de-escalation, and strengthen regional stability. Pezeshkian, in a subsequent interview with Indian media, clarified that Iran had no issue with the UAE specifically, but objected to US bases in the region being used to launch attacks against Iran, a distinction clearly aimed at separating his government's grievance with Washington from its relationship with a Gulf neighbour.

Kabir Taneja, Executive Director at the Observer Research Foundation, offered a useful framing of why this meeting happened at all: the BRICS summit provided a convenient multilateral setting for two leaders who would have struggled to justify a standalone bilateral visit under current conditions. As Taneja put it, the meeting happened specifically because of the BRICS summit's existence as a neutral, multilateral gathering point, not because of any independent thaw between Tehran and Abu Dhabi. Other analysts were careful to note that this was less a sign of genuine reconciliation and more an illustration of how multilateral forums can create diplomatic space between countries whose underlying bilateral relations remain fundamentally tense.

This tension had already complicated BRICS's institutional functioning earlier in the year. In May 2026, BRICS foreign ministers had failed to issue a joint statement at all, with New Delhi publicly attributing the impasse to "differing views among some members" over the West Asia situation, a diplomatic euphemism widely understood to mean the gap between Iran's position and the Gulf states' position. That failure made the successful, unanimous adoption of a joint declaration just a few months later in New Delhi considerably more significant than it might otherwise have appeared.

Behind closed doors, Indian officials worked through the night mediating specifically between UAE and Iranian negotiators over the language of the joint declaration, with talks reportedly continuing until approximately 4 a.m. Saturday morning before a consensus text was finalised. Later that day, Modi announced the outcome to the full assembly: "No member has raised any objection. The New Delhi Declaration 2026 is adopted unanimously."

Separately, Modi also met the UAE's Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled directly, discussing defence, artificial intelligence, space, and energy cooperation, alongside the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor initiative, an infrastructure and trade project that has taken on added significance given the instability in traditional Middle East transit routes.

Modi and Xi

The Modi-Xi meeting was the first substantial bilateral between the two leaders in three years, and the first since the 2020 Galwan Valley border clash that had frozen relations for years afterward. According to the Indian foreign ministry's readout, both leaders expressed commitment to resolving the contested border issue and agreed that differences between the two countries "should not become disputes." Modi framed the relationship around what he called "three mutuals": mutual respect, mutual sensitivity, and mutual interests. Xi, for his part, called on both sides to view the relationship "from a strategic perspective," describing India and China as ancient civilisations representing nearly three billion people between them, whose relationship should move in a "stable, long-term and healthy" direction. Modi also explicitly underlined the need for both sides to observe existing agreements and understandings on border-related issues, a pointed reminder given the history of disputed interpretations along the Line of Actual Control.

The economic backdrop to this meeting was stark. China remained India's largest trading partner in the year ending March 2026, with total trade reaching a record **$151.1 billion**. But India's trade deficit with China had also grown to a record **$112.16 billion**, up from $99.21 billion the year before, meaning India was importing vastly more from China than it was exporting to it. According to the official readout, Modi and Xi agreed specifically to address concerns around this structural trade imbalance, supply chain issues, and predictable market access, though no concrete mechanism for doing so was announced at the summit itself. The meeting built on a prior Modi-Xi encounter in Tianjin, China, the previous year, and followed a series of smaller confidence-building steps, including the resumption of direct flights between the two countries and India's relaxation of rules around Chinese investment in March 2026.

Modi and Putin

The Modi-Putin meeting, held the same day, focused heavily on the ambitious bilateral trade target both countries have set: **$100 billion by 2030**. Putin reportedly used the meeting, and the summit more broadly, to describe Western sanctions on Russia as an attempt at global dominance "by any means," a framing that fit neatly into the broader BRICS narrative of resisting Western-controlled financial and political systems. The two leaders also discussed the Ukraine conflict directly, with Russian officials indicating ahead of the summit that Putin intended to personally update Modi on the state of the war during their conversation.

The declaration

The summit's second day focused on formalising outcomes and looking toward implementation. Modi proposed a secure digital repository, described using a "Troika" arrangement, intended to track how well member countries follow through on commitments made across successive summits, an implicit acknowledgment of BRICS's long-standing struggle to convert declarations into measurable action. The 45-page joint communique released that day, while carefully avoiding naming the United States or President Trump directly, took clear aim at the West Asia war, the tariff campaign, and broader sanctions policy, calling for "maximum restraint" by parties to the West Asia conflict and expressing "deep concern" over its escalation, along with explicit condemnation of "deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities," language that clearly referenced strikes on Iranian nuclear sites without naming Israel or the United States as the parties responsible.

What was on the table

Stripping away the ceremony, the substantive agenda of the New Delhi summit fell into several clear categories.

On geopolitics and conflict, the dominant theme was unmistakably the West Asia war. The declaration's call for "maximum restraint" and its condemnation of strikes on civilian and nuclear infrastructure represented the bloc's collective, if carefully worded, response to a conflict that directly involves one of its own members. Ukraine, by contrast, received comparatively lighter treatment in the text, a notable shift from earlier years when the war dominated BRICS statements more heavily, reflecting perhaps both fatigue with the conflict's lack of resolution and the bloc's unwillingness to further alienate Russia, a founding member, by dwelling on it. Terrorism was addressed directly and specifically, with the declaration condemning the Pahalgam attack by name, a notable inclusion given how difficult it typically is to secure unanimous language naming a specific incident in a multilateral document.

On economics, the declaration voiced serious concern about the rise of unilateral tariffs and non-tariff measures, describing them as inconsistent with World Trade Organization rules and warning that such measures threaten to reduce global trade, disrupt supply chains, and introduce uncertainty, language transparently aimed at the Trump administration's trade policy without naming it directly. The declaration also pushed for reform of the IMF and World Bank, framed by Modi around three pillars: representation, responsiveness, and rule-making, explicitly tying the representation pillar to India's long-standing demand for UN Security Council reform.

On currency and payments, India was explicit and direct in confirming that there is currently no proposal for a common BRICS currency, a clarification aimed squarely at years of exaggerated Western commentary suggesting the bloc was building toward a shared monetary alternative to the dollar. The actual, narrower focus remains on expanding local-currency settlement between members and gradually improving cross-border payment infrastructure, a far more modest and technically achievable goal than a common currency, but one still aimed at the same underlying objective of reducing collective dependence on dollar-denominated trade.

On technology, artificial intelligence cooperation featured prominently for the first time at this level of detail in a BRICS declaration, reflecting the bloc's recognition that AI infrastructure and governance is rapidly becoming as strategically important as traditional trade and energy questions. This theme also surfaced directly in Modi's bilateral meeting with the UAE's Crown Prince, where AI cooperation was discussed alongside more traditional topics like defence and energy.

On health, the declaration endorsed a new BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle, with a joint roadmap running from 2026 to 2029, alongside support for a Training Hub Network and Centres of Excellence tied to India's National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, extending BRICS cooperation into mental health specifically for the first time at this institutional level.

The economics underneath

Economically, BRICS in its current 11-member form represents a bloc with real scale: roughly a quarter of global nominal GDP and close to half the world's population, spanning some of the planet's largest energy producers and consumers simultaneously. That scale is precisely what has made the bloc a growing subject of concern in Washington, and precisely what limits its actual cohesion as an economic actor.

The India-China trade relationship illustrates this tension well. Despite deep political distrust and an unresolved border dispute, the two countries conducted a record $151.1 billion in trade in the year to March 2026, with China remaining India's single largest source of imported goods, particularly across electronics, machinery, chemicals, solar equipment, and industrial components. Yet India's ballooning trade deficit with China, now over $112 billion, represents exactly the kind of structural imbalance that complicates any narrative of BRICS as a unified economic counterweight to the West. India needs Chinese manufacturing inputs even as it strategically distrusts Beijing, a contradiction that shaped the tone of the Modi-Xi meeting far more than any single border announcement did.

The India-Russia relationship shows a different kind of economic logic. Russia has become one of India's most important energy suppliers specifically because Western sanctions pushed Moscow to offer steep discounts that Indian refiners found difficult to refuse, particularly amid separate disruptions to Middle Eastern supply during the West Asia conflict. The $100 billion trade target both countries have set by 2030 depends heavily on this energy relationship continuing, even as it remains a persistent point of friction with Washington.

Layered over both of these bilateral dynamics is the broader, bloc-wide debate over de-dollarization, a term used loosely and often inaccurately in Western commentary to describe what is, in practice, a fairly cautious and incremental push toward local-currency trade settlement. Trump's repeated threats of tariffs against countries perceived as undermining the dollar's global reserve status have not stopped this incremental shift, but they have clearly kept it limited in scope, with even Russia and Iran, the bloc's members most motivated to escape dollar dependence, unable to convince the wider membership to move faster than a slow, member-by-member pace of local-currency arrangements.

How the outside world watched

Perhaps the most revealing part of this summit is not what happened inside Bharat Mandapam, but how it was interpreted by governments and analysts who were not in the room.

In Washington, the summit was read almost entirely through the lens of the ongoing trade war and the dollar question. Trump has previously described BRICS as an "attack on the dollar," and analysts following the summit noted that his tariff threats had visibly shaped how BRICS members approached de-dollarization discussions, keeping the bloc's actual currency proposals notably more cautious than its rhetoric might suggest. American commentary, including from and CNBC, framed the summit primarily as a test of whether BRICS could translate its growing economic weight into coordinated geopolitical action, with most Western analysts concluding that the bloc remains, in the words of one South Asia analyst, a "pragmatic club for limited purposes" rather than a coherent ideological bloc against the United States. India-watchers including Sushant Singh and Chietigj Bajpaee made a related point: India specifically wants BRICS to promote a non-Western worldview without becoming explicitly anti-Western, a nuanced position frequently lost in more alarmist Western coverage of the bloc as a unified anti-American front.

European reaction, less prominently covered but broadly consistent with the American framing, tended to focus on the joint declaration's language around tariffs and the West Asia war, reading it as further evidence of a widening gap between the Global South's priorities and the transatlantic alliance's approach to both trade policy and Middle East conflict management.

Within the wider Global South, however, particularly in countries not part of BRICS but sympathetic to its stated aims, the summit was read considerably more favourably. The successful, if narrowly achieved, consensus among a group containing Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, was cited as evidence that BRICS remains a genuinely useful multilateral forum precisely because it does not require ideological alignment among its members, only a shared interest in gradually rebalancing global institutions that these countries generally view as historically weighted toward Western interests.

It's worth placing this summit's US-facing tone in context against its immediate predecessor. The 2025 Rio summit, held under considerably more acute versions of the same tensions, saw the bloc's declaration condemn tariff increases and attacks on Iran while still carefully avoiding naming Trump directly, a pattern repeated almost exactly in New Delhi a year later. Notably, Xi Jinping had skipped the Rio summit entirely, and Putin had appeared only by videoconference given his outstanding arrest warrant, making his and Xi's in-person attendance in New Delhi a meaningful escalation in visible commitment to the bloc compared to the year before.

Compared with earlier summits

India has now hosted BRICS four times, more than any other member, and comparing New Delhi 2026 against its own history, and against the wider 18-summit record of the bloc, sharpens what makes this particular gathering distinctive.

India's first hosting, the 2012 summit in New Delhi, dealt with a narrow, technocratic agenda centred on financial reform and food and energy security, involving just five member countries with no active wars between any of them. India's second hosting, the 2016 Goa summit, introduced the outreach format later echoed in 2026's own BRICS Plus Dialogue, but again involved only the original five members in a comparatively calm international environment. India's third hosting, the virtual 2021 summit, lacked any in-person diplomacy entirely, meaning none of the sideline bilateral meetings that defined New Delhi 2026, including the pivotal Pezeshkian-Al Nahyan encounter, would even have been structurally possible in that format.

Set against summits held elsewhere, the 2014 Fortaleza summit in Brazil remains the most institutionally significant in BRICS history, having created the New Development Bank and Contingent Reserve Arrangement. No comparable new institution emerged from New Delhi 2026; instead, the summit's energy went into managing an already-expanded, already-divided membership through an active regional war, a fundamentally different and arguably harder diplomatic task than building new financial institutions from a position of relative unity, as the five original members had done in 2014.

The 2023 Johannesburg summit is the direct ancestor of New Delhi 2026's central drama, since it was there that Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Ethiopia were formally invited to join. Without that expansion decision, there would have been no Pezeshkian-Al Nahyan meeting to broker in 2026, because neither Iran nor the UAE would have been BRICS members in the first place. In that sense, Johannesburg 2023 planted the seed, and New Delhi 2026 is where that seed's most difficult consequence — reconciling active regional adversaries within a single multilateral framework — came due.

What it means

Taken together, the New Delhi summit captures BRICS at a genuinely difficult and interesting inflection point. The bloc has grown large enough, and diverse enough, that producing any unanimous outcome now requires real diplomatic labour, evidenced most starkly by the overnight negotiations between Indian, Emirati, and Iranian officials and by the extraordinary fact of a sitting Iranian president and an Abu Dhabi Crown Prince meeting face to face weeks after trading missile strikes. Yet that same size and diversity is precisely what gives BRICS whatever leverage it has left to claim relevance on the world stage: a joint declaration agreed by 11 countries spanning nearly every major regional conflict on earth carries a different kind of diplomatic weight than a five-country consensus ever could, however cautiously worded that declaration ultimately turned out to be.

For India specifically, the summit reinforced a role New Delhi has been building for several years now: not a leader trying to push BRICS toward outright confrontation with the West, and not a passive host either, but a deliberate bridge-builder, willing to spend an entire night mediating between two warring foreign governments specifically because doing so serves India's own interest in being seen as an indispensable convener within the Global South, all while simultaneously deepening its own separate relationships with Washington, Brussels, and Moscow without visible contradiction. Whether that balancing act remains sustainable as the underlying conflicts in West Asia and Ukraine continue unresolved is, realistically, the question every BRICS summit from here forward will have to answer over again.