BRICS at Eighteen: India's Summit Test Is Whether the Club Becomes an Institution

India is set to host the BRICS summit this year, only the fourth time it has done so, and the next such opportunity is not expected for another decade. That gap alone has sharpened a question that has trailed the grouping for years: whether a club born as an investment shorthand is ready to function as a serious institution.

BRICS began in 2001 as an acronym devised by a Goldman Sachs economist to market emerging markets to investors. Summits followed from 2009. Nearly two decades on, it has evolved into a premier forum for emerging economies, with the kind of summit-level weight that inevitably draws in geopolitics, much as the G20 discovered.

The scale of activity around the process is considerable. More than 350 meetings precede the summit, and the last gathering in Rio produced a declaration running to 126 paragraphs, covering trade, climate, technology, humanitarian concerns and global governance. A grouping whose heads of state sign off on a document of that length is no longer a niche investors' huddle.

Its membership has widened too. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have joined the founding five. Every new member except Ethiopia is a Muslim-majority country, which some read as a tilt. The reality, however, is that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Ethiopia have strategic reasons to avoid picking fights with the West. Their presence gives India more room to prevent BRICS from hardening into an anti-Western caucus. A larger BRICS, counterintuitively, may prove a more moderate one.

Yet the challenges are substantial and worth stating plainly. China's economic weight risks making the grouping look like a Beijing-led vehicle, which is why most members resist Sino-centric ideas such as a common currency. The India-China strategic rivalry remains a central variable, and much of the bloc's dynamic will depend on how durable the current tactical accommodation between the two Asian giants proves to be. With eleven members pulling in different directions, consensus is thin, and Rio's 126 paragraphs papered over as much as they resolved.

On de-dollarisation, the fear that most animates Washington, the picture is more modest than rhetoric suggests. A common currency remains a fantasy with no obvious anchor, and the yuan is not one. The likelier path is a slow diffusion of trade into local currencies, including the rupee. It is neither India's agenda nor Brazil's.

Eighteen years in, BRICS still has no secretariat, no home city and no one in charge between summits. It meets, declaims and disperses, with no permanent staff whose full-time job is to turn summit language into follow-through. Building that machinery, a secretariat, a host city and a secretary-general, is the structural step that would let leaders arrive to decide rather than to discover.

India is positioned to lead such a push. As a founding member, it could offer New Delhi as the home of BRICS and put forward the first secretary-general. It chaired the G20 in 2023 and will chair BRICS in 2026, placing it at the intersection of the established G7 economies and the rising powers of the BRICS core. With the Gulf, Iran and Africa now inside the tent, a steadier grouping could lend weight to quiet peacemaking where Western forums are stalemated, and give the global economy a stabilising, confidently non-Western voice.

None of this assumes unity. BRICS will lack unanimity for years. But even a fractious, enlarged bloc can both challenge and supplement Western groupings, reminding the old order that the rest of the world has options.