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Daily Current Affairs · Raman Academy, Shimla
Negotiators work late into the evening to arrive at consensus for the ‘Delhi Declaration’
The 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi is a pivotal moment for Indian diplomacy, and the hardest part of hosting has been invisible to the cameras: forging a consensus “Delhi Declaration” across an enlarged membership. Negotiators and sherpas worked late into Friday evening with agreement reached on almost all the text except one paragraph — the language on the conflict in West Asia, where members Iran and the UAE hold irreconcilable positions. India’s push for a joint outcome document underlines its self-assigned role as bridge-builder between competing interest blocs within the Global South.
Key Takeaways & Core Analysis
Negotiations stalled over a single paragraph. Iran wants explicit condemnation of U.S. and Israeli actions; the UAE wants equal condemnation of Iranian retaliatory drone and missile strikes, contending that attacks on Gulf installations were self-defence limited to military and ancillary targets. Both are BRICS members, so neither can be outvoted — the bloc works by consensus.
This is not new. Iran–UAE tensions blocked joint statements at BRICS ministerial meetings through 2026, forcing External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to issue a “Chair’s Summary” in May rather than an agreed communiqué. India had faced the same problem at the G-20 in 2023 over Ukraine, and solved it then with creative drafting.
Prime Minister Modi ran intensive side diplomacy — meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Russian President Vladimir Putin and UAE representatives — using economic and political weight to pull the parties toward a joint declaration. Pezeshkian’s red-carpet reception was itself a signal, and he is the only BRICS leader scheduled to meet President Droupadi Murmu.
Leaders of eight member nations attended in person. Brazil sent Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira with elections approaching; the UAE was represented by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi; Saudi Arabia, granted membership in 2024 but yet to formally join, sent its Foreign Minister. Who a country sends is itself a statement about how much it invests in the forum.
The main session is built around “Global Governance and Strengthening Multilateralism”, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres attending. Beyond the declaration fight, the summit functions as a venue for energy security, trade continuity and supply chain management amid wider geopolitical disruption.
Outcome Documents Compared
| Instrument | Requires consensus? | What it signals |
|---|---|---|
| Joint Declaration | Yes — every member must accept every paragraph | Full agreement; the strongest outcome a consensus body can produce |
| Chair’s Statement | No — issued on the chair’s authority | Records the chair’s reading of discussion where members diverge |
| Chair’s Summary | No — a factual note of proceedings | Weakest outcome; used in May 2026 when Iran and the UAE could not agree |
| Outcome document with footnotes | Partial | Dissenting positions recorded separately so the rest of the text survives |
| Constructive ambiguity | Yes, formally | Language vague enough for opposed parties to read it their own way — the G-20 New Delhi 2023 technique |
Static Dimensions to Revise
- Evolution of BRICS: Term coined in 2001; first formal foreign ministers’ meeting on the UN General Assembly sidelines in 2006; first leaders’ summit in 2009; South Africa joined in 2010; expansion from 2024 onward added Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
- India’s hosting record: This is India’s fourth BRICS summit — New Delhi 2012, Goa 2016, virtual 2021, and New Delhi 2026 — coming after the G-20 presidency of 2023.
- Institutional mechanisms: The New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) as claimed alternatives to the World Bank and IMF.
- Multilateralism vs bilateralism: Why consensus-based declarations become near-impossible when member states are parties to an active regional conflict; the difference between consensus, unanimity and weighted voting.
- Strategic autonomy: India’s multi-alignment — simultaneous membership of Quad and I2U2 alongside BRICS and the SCO; channelling BRICS away from a security-centric anti-Western posture toward development cooperation.
- Energy geopolitics: Strategic vulnerability at the Strait of Hormuz, oil price volatility, and supply chain dependence among emerging economies.
India Implications
- India’s difficulty is structural, not diplomatic skill: consensus rules give every member a veto, so enlargement that boosted BRICS’s economic weight simultaneously reduced its ability to say anything. More members means more heft and less agreement at the same time.
- India’s balancing here is genuinely delicate — it buys discounted Russian crude, has built the Chabahar relationship with Iran, and counts the UAE as a top trade partner and CEPA signatory. Taking a side in the declaration would cost something real in each direction.
- A successful Delhi Declaration would be a diplomatic marker comparable to the G-20 consensus of 2023; a Chair’s Summary instead would be read globally as the expanded bloc failing its first serious test.
- The presence of the UN Secretary-General gives India a platform to press UNSC reform, though BRICS itself is split on this — China has never supported India’s permanent seat.
- HP AngleHimachal Pradesh has its own place in the history of hard bilateral negotiation. The Shimla Agreement was signed on 2 July 1972 at Barnes Court (now Raj Bhavan) between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, converting the ceasefire line into the Line of Control and committing both states to settle disputes bilaterally. The parallel is worth drawing in an HPAS or HAS interview: that negotiation also went late into the night over contested wording, and its durability came from language both sides could live with rather than from either side conceding. Students in Shimla are studying consensus diplomacy in a city where a textbook case of it was concluded.
Conclusion: The deliberations in New Delhi showcase India’s growing role as a consensus broker in multilateral diplomacy. Navigating the fault line between Iran and the UAE while managing wider economic disruption determines whether BRICS can project unified leadership for the Global South. Securing a Delhi Declaration would reinforce the premise that multilateral dialogue still works amid rising polarisation.
Q. With reference to BRICS, consider the following statements:
- BRICS was originally formed as BRIC before South Africa became a member.
- The New Development Bank was established to finance infrastructure and sustainable development projects.
- The Contingent Reserve Arrangement is intended to provide a framework for financial support during balance-of-payments pressures.
- All decisions within BRICS are taken through a legally binding treaty-based voting mechanism.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
Click to reveal answer
Statements 1, 2 and 3 are correct. The grouping was BRIC until South Africa joined in 2010; the NDB, launched in 2015, funds infrastructure and sustainable development; the CRA is a currency swap arrangement meant to cushion balance-of-payments stress. Statement 4 is wrong and is the whole point of today’s lead story — BRICS operates by consensus, with no treaty-based voting mechanism and no enforcement machinery. That is precisely why a single disputed paragraph can hold up an entire declaration.
Q. “India’s role in BRICS reflects a shift from bloc politics towards issue-based strategic autonomy.” Discuss.
10 Marks · 150 WordsIndia building economic bridges amid rise in global trade barriers, says Modi
At the BRICS Business Forum in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Vladimir Putin and President Masoud Pezeshkian addressed the same backdrop — rising protectionism, supply chain vulnerability and geopolitical conflict — and arrived at three noticeably different prescriptions. Reading the divergence is more instructive than reading any single speech.
Key Takeaways & Core Analysis
Modi argued that with trade barriers climbing and sea routes constrained, India is building bridges rather than walls — free trade agreements with around 40 countries since 2014, plus functional BRICS machinery: the MSME Portal, the Start-Up Innovation Fund and the Incubator Network connecting small firms to markets and finance.
Global trade moves only when sea lanes are secure and seafarers are safe. Modi positioned India as a firm supporter of freedom of navigation — a formulation with weight given that a large share of global seafarers are Indian nationals, and one that also speaks to the Indo-Pacific.
Putin argued that the leading powers of the late twentieth century are being displaced by new growth engines, and that competition is taking “ugly forms” — pipelines destroyed, transport corridors blocked, maritime vessels seized, secondary sanctions applied. He noted the threat of sanctions against countries that decline to follow another’s interest, without naming India or the U.S. over the 100% tariff penalty threatened for Russian oil purchases.
Iran’s President argued that after decades of sanctions and the military strikes of February 2026, economic security cannot be separated from national and regional security. His prescription is to reduce exposure to unilateral sanctions by expanding local currency settlement, so that no country can weaponise a financial instrument or monopolise a technology.
The expanded grouping accounts for roughly half the world’s population, about 40% of global GDP and around a quarter of global trade. Over recent decades the combined GDP of members grew at close to twice the rate of the global economy — the fact that gives the bloc its leverage, whatever its declarations say.
Three Visions at One Forum
| Speaker | Diagnosis | Prescription | Implied posture toward the West |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narendra Modi (India) | Trade barriers rising; sea routes constrained | More FTAs, open supply chains, maritime security, MSME integration | Engagement — keep trade open rather than build a rival bloc |
| Vladimir Putin (Russia) | Old powers resisting displacement through non-market tactics | Counter secondary sanctions; build parallel networks of trade and finance | Confrontation — the existing order is being defended by force |
| Masoud Pezeshkian (Iran) | Sanctions and strikes make economic and national security inseparable | Expand local currency settlement; avoid dependence on any single instrument | Insulation — reduce exposure rather than negotiate |
| Common ground | Supply chain fragility and chokepoint risk | Local currency trade, logistics cooperation, MSME linkage | Shared interest even where strategy differs |
Static Dimensions to Revise
- Multilateralism vs minilateralism: BRICS as a platform for pushing reform at the UN, IMF and World Bank and for advocating a multipolar order; how minilateral groupings differ from universal institutions.
- Strategic autonomy: India balancing Western-aligned frameworks (Quad, I2U2) with Global South platforms (BRICS, SCO) to avoid single-bloc alignment.
- De-dollarisation: The BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism and local currency trade as a way of reducing exposure to SWIFT and dollar clearing — and the practical limits of doing so.
- Sea lines of communication: Chokepoints — the Strait of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb and the Malacca Strait — and their criticality to India’s energy imports; UNCLOS and freedom of navigation as legal foundations.
- MSME ecosystem: Integrating MSMEs and startups into global value chains through regional hubs as a route to export diversification and resilience.
India Implications
- India is the only one of the three speakers arguing for keeping the existing system open rather than replacing or escaping it — consistent with an economy that needs Western markets, Russian energy and Gulf remittances simultaneously.
- Local currency settlement carries an unglamorous constraint: it works only where trade is roughly balanced. India’s rupee arrangements have run into exactly this, with partners accumulating rupee balances they struggle to deploy.
- “Freedom of navigation” is deliberately double-edged in Indian usage — it applies to Hormuz and the Red Sea for energy, and to the South China Sea in the Indo-Pacific context, where China is the implied subject.
- The BRICS MSME Portal and Start-Up Innovation Fund are the practical deliverables most likely to touch Indian firms directly, since they need no consensus on geopolitics to function.
- HP AngleHimachal Pradesh’s export economy is MSME-shaped and would gain more from the functional machinery than from any declaration. The Baddi–Barotiwala–Nalagarh belt hosts a dense cluster of small and mid-sized pharmaceutical and formulation units whose main growth constraint is buyer access in new markets — precisely what a BRICS MSME portal is meant to address, and a route worth exploring as Western regulatory scrutiny tightens. On the agricultural side, HPMC and private packers have been trying to widen apple and stone-fruit exports beyond the domestic mandi system for years. Russia and West Asia are large fruit importers, and rupee-rouble or rupee-dirham settlement would matter to exporters whose margins are thin enough that currency conversion costs are not trivial.
Conclusion: The Business Forum reflects a real shift in global economic geography. Russia and Iran emphasise counter-measures against sanctions and trade monopolies; India advocates open supply chains, maritime security and lower trade barriers. India’s aim is to use BRICS as a platform for development, financial inclusion and economic cooperation without fragmenting global trade into hostile blocs.
Q. With reference to BRICS, consider the following statements:
- BRICS seeks greater representation of emerging economies in global governance institutions.
- BRICS cooperation is confined exclusively to economic and financial matters.
- The grouping provides a platform for discussions on alternative financial and payment arrangements.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
Click to reveal answer
Statements 1 and 3 are correct — pressing for a larger voice for emerging economies is the bloc’s founding political purpose, and local currency settlement and payment interoperability are standing agenda items. Statement 2 fails on the word “exclusively”: BRICS rests on three pillars — political and security, economic and financial, and cultural and people-to-people — and today’s deadlock over West Asian conflict language is itself proof that the grouping ranges well beyond economics.
Q. “BRICS is increasingly becoming a platform for economic cooperation as well as a forum for reshaping the global governance architecture.” Discuss.
10 Marks · 150 WordsSC seeks timeline for FSSAI’s food warning label roll-out
A Supreme Court Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran has put the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India’s two-phase rollout of Front-of-Pack Warning Labels (FoPL) under scrutiny, warning that without a clear, scientifically justified timeline the second phase could be “indefinitely postponed”. Hearing a PIL filed by the non-profit 3S and Our Health Society, the Court directed FSSAI to file an affidavit within 10 days and posted the matter to 28 September.
Key Takeaways & Core Analysis
FSSAI proposed applying warnings first to foods high in two or more nutrients of concern — added fat, added sugar and salt — reserving single-nutrient warnings for Phase II. The Court questioned why a product high in one nutrient should escape the first phase when excess of even one poses health risk, noting the petitioners’ argument that the two-nutrient requirement lacks scientific basis.
Rather than striking the phasing down, the Bench suggested inverting it: bring products with the highest concentration of nutrients of concern under the warning regime first, followed by those with lower levels. Severity, in other words, should decide sequence — not the number of nutrients breached.
The Bench flagged a departure from a 2021 stakeholder consensus. The current proposal measures added sugar and added fat, whereas the earlier consensus favoured total sugar and saturated and trans fat. The distinction is not technical hair-splitting — a product can be high in total sugar while showing little added sugar, and escape the label.
Acknowledging that children are particularly vulnerable to “impulse or uninformed dietary decision-making”, the Court asked the Union Government to consider building label-reading and nutritional literacy into school curricula — treating the consumer’s capacity to read a label as part of the regulation itself.
The Bench questioned whether a red hexagon logo might confuse Indian consumers, who associate a red mark on packaging with non-vegetarian content under existing labelling rules, and asked FSSAI to clarify logo size, font and layout. It also took note of concerns about placing ultra-processed foods on the same footing as minimally processed packaged foods.
Front-of-Pack Labelling Models Compared
| Model | How it works | Used in | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warning octagons | Black stop-sign marks: “high in sugar”, “high in salt” | Chile, Peru, Mexico, Israel | Warning — flags what to avoid |
| Nutri-Score | Composite A-to-E letter grade with colour | France, Belgium, Germany and others | Interpretive — ranks overall nutritional quality |
| Health Star Rating | Half to five stars for overall profile | Australia, New Zealand | Interpretive — voluntary in practice |
| Traffic light labelling | Red, amber and green per nutrient | United Kingdom | Hybrid — per-nutrient colour coding |
| FSSAI’s proposal | Warning mark for foods high in two or more nutrients of concern in Phase I | India — under judicial scrutiny | Warning — contested on threshold, phasing and symbol design |
Static Dimensions to Revise
- Statutory role of FSSAI: Established under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006; sets science-based standards for food articles; functions under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare; regulates labelling through the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020.
- Judicial review of regulatory policy: How courts uphold the Right to Health read into Article 21 by requiring regulators to act with clarity and within defined timelines — without substituting their own policy for the regulator’s.
- Public health: The rising burden of non-communicable diseases — diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease — and preventive regulation as a policy instrument; the Eat Right India movement.
- Economics: Information asymmetry in consumer markets and how front-of-pack labelling corrects it where dense back-of-pack nutrition tables do not; balancing public health against reasonable reformulation timelines for industry.
- Related concepts: Ultra-processed foods and the NOVA classification; the distinction between an interpretive label and a warning label.
India Implications
- The case is a clean illustration of judicial review of regulatory delay. The Court has not written the regulation; it has demanded a defensible timeline and scientific justification for the thresholds chosen — a distinction worth reproducing in any answer on judicial overreach.
- The added versus total sugar question determines how much of the packaged food market the label actually touches. Fruit-based beverages, sweetened dairy and many traditional sweets carry high total sugar with modest added sugar.
- The red hexagon objection is a reminder that regulatory design has to work in the country it operates in — India already uses a red mark to denote non-vegetarian food, and a second red mark risks being read as the first.
- Labels only work where people can read them, which is why the Court’s direction on nutritional literacy in schools is the more durable half of the intervention.
- HP AngleHimachal Pradesh sits on both sides of this regulation. As a producer, the state’s food processing sector — HPMC’s apple juice concentrate and beverage lines, plus the packaged food units in the Baddi belt — would face reformulation or labelling costs, with fruit-based drinks squarely inside the added-versus-total sugar question. As a consumer state, HP reports a substantial and rising burden of diabetes and hypertension, and its scattered hill markets are supplied overwhelmingly by packaged products trucked in from outside. Enforcement would fall to the office of the Commissioner of Food Safety, Himachal Pradesh, whose inspection reach across remote blocks is the practical limit on any labelling rule, however well drafted.
Conclusion: The Court’s intervention underscores the need for a transparent, scientifically sound and non-delayed regulatory framework for packaged food. By demanding a defined timeline and emphasising child-centric nutritional literacy, the judiciary reinforces public health as an integral aspect of the fundamental right to life — and a robust FoPL framework would bring Indian food regulation closer to international practice on long-term NCD risk.
Q. With reference to Front-of-Pack Labelling (FoPL), consider the following statements:
- It is intended to provide consumers with easily understandable nutritional information on packaged foods.
- It can help consumers identify products containing excessive levels of nutrients of concern.
- It is applicable only to unprocessed agricultural commodities.
- It can be used as a tool for preventing diet-related non-communicable diseases.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
Click to reveal answer
Statements 1, 2 and 4 are correct — FoPL exists to make nutritional information legible at a glance, to flag excess nutrients of concern, and to serve as a preventive instrument against diet-related NCDs. Statement 3 inverts the truth: front-of-pack labelling applies to packaged and processed foods, not to loose unprocessed agricultural commodities, which carry no pack to label in the first place.
Q. Front-of-pack food warning labels represent an intersection of consumer rights, public health and regulatory governance. Discuss.
10 Marks · 150 WordsA bigger BRICS, shaped by India’s vision
Writing ahead of the summit, Ambassador Mohan Kumar — former Indian Ambassador to France, now Dean and Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University — argues that an expanded BRICS, whose purchasing power parity output now exceeds that of the G-7, has become “too big to ignore or fail”. His central claim is about method rather than size: India’s stewardship has deliberately steered the bloc away from divisive political questions toward functional economic and technological cooperation, where agreement is actually reachable.
Key Takeaways & Core Analysis
India has redefined the letters themselves — Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. Rebranding an acronym is a small gesture, but it announces a developmental agenda in place of a geopolitical one, and it gives the chair a frame under which to file concrete deliverables.
BRICS rests on three pillars — political and security, economic and financial, and cultural and people-to-people. Kumar’s reading is that India’s agenda relates far more to the second and third than the first, largely deciding what to do about the big geopolitical issues by working around them.
Operational initiatives include the BRICS Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage, adoption of the Logistics Supply Chain Cooperation Framework, and Centres of Excellence on Agro-Ecology and Regenerative Agriculture. Once operational, these provide the ballast a grouping needs when its politics cannot bear weight.
To close scientific capability gaps among members, India pushed a Start-Up Innovation Fund, a BRICS Incubator Network, the MSME Portal, a digital public infrastructure repository, and an action plan to open mega science facilities to all members — since members are not at the same level of development when it comes to scientific research.
Building on Brazil’s prior agenda, India prioritised combating desertification, disaster management and forest-fire preparedness, sustainable aviation fuels, and community-based climate adaptation — a deliberate corrective, since international fora focus almost exclusively on mitigation.
The Recalibrated Acronym, Item by Item
| Pillar | Initiatives under India’s chairship | Why it needs no political consensus |
|---|---|---|
| Building Resilience | Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage; Logistics Supply Chain Cooperation Framework | Grid and logistics standards are technical; members benefit regardless of alignment |
| Innovation | Start-Up Innovation Fund; Incubator Network; MSME Portal; DPI repository; mega science facility access | Capability-sharing is positive-sum and does not require anyone to concede a position |
| Cooperation | Revitalising the multilateral trading system; urbanisation forum; Centres of Excellence on women’s health; digital capacity for women | Sectoral cooperation proceeds even while declarations stall |
| Sustainability | Desertification; disaster and forest-fire preparedness; sustainable aviation fuels; community-based adaptation | Adaptation carries no binding emission commitments, so developing members can sign on |
Static Dimensions to Revise
- Shift in global economic power: An expanded BRICS representing over 40% of world population and, on a PPP basis, over 40% of global GDP — surpassing the G-7 and pushing for multipolar governance.
- Strategic autonomy and hedging: India using BRICS to widen its strategic options and lead the Global South while preventing the grouping from hardening into an anti-Western security bloc.
- DPI diplomacy: UPI, Aadhaar-style identity frameworks and open-source technology stacks deployed as instruments of development cooperation — India’s most exportable soft-power asset.
- Climate adaptation versus mitigation: Why community-level resilience and agro-ecology address the immediate vulnerabilities of developing nations without binding them to restrictive emission mandates.
- Supply chain security: Multilateral logistics frameworks as a hedge against geopolitical chokepoints and unilateral trade restrictions.
India Implications
- The functional-cooperation strategy is a considered response to a structural problem: in a grouping where members are at war with each other’s partners, only the non-political agenda can move. Institution-building is what survives the headlines.
- Pushing adaptation up the agenda serves India’s negotiating interest directly, since mitigation-first framing consistently puts the burden on developing economies still building energy capacity.
- DPI export is a genuine comparative advantage — India has something other members want and cannot easily build, which converts into influence without cost.
- The honest caveat in Kumar’s own argument is that an agenda designed to avoid politics is also an agenda that never resolves it; the Iran–UAE paragraph does not disappear because a smart grids centre opens.
- HP AngleTwo items on this agenda land directly in Himachal Pradesh. The Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage addresses exactly the problem a hydropower state faces: HP generates a large seasonal surplus in the monsoon months and imports power in winter when glacial-fed flows drop, which is a storage and grid-management problem before it is a generation one. Second, the Centres of Excellence on Agro-Ecology and Regenerative Agriculture map onto the state’s Prakritik Kheti Khushhal Kisan Yojana, its natural farming programme — one of the larger state-level experiments of its kind in India, and the sort of thing a BRICS knowledge-sharing platform exists to circulate. Add forest-fire preparedness, a recurring summer emergency across HP’s chir pine belt, and three of the four pillars have a Himachal application.
Conclusion: Kumar’s argument is that BRICS has grown too big to ignore or fail, and that India’s leadership demonstrates a pragmatic route forward: where geopolitics divides multilateral bodies, shared economic interests, technology transfer and sustainability goals still offer a path. By prioritising people-centric development, India positions itself as a bridge between the Global South and global governance networks.
Q. “India’s BRICS strategy seeks to convert a geopolitically diverse grouping into a platform for functional cooperation.” Discuss.
10 Marks · 150 WordsMore heft: the Summit allows India to advance its global ambitions
Forging a joint statement at a major multilateral conference is never easy, and it is harder in the middle of global conflict. The editorial’s argument is that hosting the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam is India’s second such responsibility in recent years after the G-20 Summit of 2023, and that it arrives at a difficult moment — but that reconciling the bloc’s competing strands would be a substantial win for Indian diplomacy.
Key Takeaways & Core Analysis
India last hosted BRICS in 2012, 2016 and virtually in 2021, when it was a smaller grouping of five major powers and managing consensus was easier. Since the expansion added Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, BRICS’s identity has evolved and a common focus remains elusive. Eleven members means eleven vetoes.
The war involving Iran has sharpened the problem. Iran, a victim of the February strikes, and the UAE, attacked by Iran in retaliation, are members unwilling to agree a common narrative. India’s position on Israel also diverges from a grouping that has traditionally taken a more critical line.
The largest share of New Delhi’s problems as host comes from the United States, where the President has accused BRICS of plotting to overthrow the dollar’s dominance and threatened tariffs on all members over intra-BRICS payments and trade. As India seeks to restore ties with Washington and pursue its Indo-Pacific strategy, hosting BRICS carries a cost — but yielding to that pressure would be irrational.
BRICS accounts for roughly half the world’s population, two-fifths of the global economy and a fourth of global trade. It includes many of the world’s top energy producers and biggest consumers. The bloc would prefer not to be called anti-Western, but it is certainly a powerful counter to the G-7 and Western-led thinking.
Membership gives India more heft in advancing its ambitions on the global high table, and the presidency has ensured prominence on the world stage as leaders and representatives of 11 countries gather in Delhi. Reconciling the bloc’s internal fractures is what converts prominence into standing.
The Expansion and What Each Member Brings
| Member | Joined | What it adds | Friction it introduces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil, Russia, India, China | Founding group (2006 ministerial; 2009 summit) | Scale, and the original claim to represent emerging economies | India–China rivalry runs through everything the bloc does |
| South Africa | 2010 | African representation; the “S” in the acronym | Smallest economy; cautious on de-dollarisation |
| Iran | 2024 | Energy reserves; a sanctioned economy seeking alternatives | Active conflict with another member’s partners; hardens the bloc’s image |
| UAE | 2024 | Financial hub; major trade partner of India | Directly opposed to Iran on West Asian conflict language |
| Egypt, Ethiopia | 2024 | African and Red Sea geography; Global South legitimacy | Both carry heavy external debt burdens |
| Saudi Arabia | Invited 2024 — yet to formally join | The largest swing producer in global oil | Its ambivalence is itself a signal about the bloc’s pull |
| Indonesia | 2025 | Largest Southeast Asian economy; ASEAN bridge | Committed to non-alignment; wary of bloc identity |
Static Dimensions to Revise
- Multipolarity and strategic autonomy: India’s simultaneous participation in Western-aligned frameworks (Quad, I2U2) and Global South blocs (BRICS, SCO) as non-alignment updated into strategic hedging.
- Global governance reform: Advocacy for reforming the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN Security Council to better represent emerging market economies.
- De-dollarisation: Local currency settlement mechanisms such as BRICS Pay and the Interbank Cooperation System, and their implications for global financial architecture and monetary sovereignty.
- Trade integration and supply chains: Navigating trade barriers, protectionism and maritime security to safeguard export corridors and energy supply chains.
- Energy geopolitics: Balancing oil imports and trade diversification with the key producers inside the bloc — Russia, Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
India Implications
- India is hosting a grouping that Washington has publicly attacked, while simultaneously repairing ties with Washington. The editorial’s judgement — that yielding to tariff pressure would be irrational — is the clearest statement of the strategic autonomy case, and it is the sentence to carry into an answer on the subject.
- Expansion produced a real trade-off worth stating plainly: more economic weight, less capacity to speak with one voice. Whether this is a strength depends entirely on what the bloc is for.
- Four of the world’s significant energy producers now sit inside the same grouping as India, one of the largest importers — an alignment of interests that does not require a declaration to be useful.
- India’s divergence from the traditional BRICS position on Israel is a reminder that India’s membership is instrumental rather than ideological; it belongs to BRICS without adopting its collective reflexes.
- HP AngleOf all the intra-BRICS relationships, the one with the most direct territorial meaning for Himachal Pradesh is India–China. The state shares a long Himalayan border with Chinese-controlled Tibet across Kinnaur and Lahaul-Spiti, and border management shapes concrete things in HP — road and tunnel construction under the Border Roads Organisation, the strategic case for the Atal Tunnel and all-weather connectivity to Spiti, the Vibrant Villages programme in frontier blocks, and the pace of ITBP deployment. When India and China sit at the same table in Delhi discussing multipolarity, the practical consequence in Shimla is whether border infrastructure and the seasonal trade routes stay quiet. For HPAS candidates, this is the rare instance where a global-governance story has a mappable local dimension.
Conclusion: The 2026 Delhi Summit is a test for Indian diplomacy. By balancing complex geopolitical interests, promoting economic cooperation and building consensus among diverse members, India reinforces its position as a central voice for the Global South and an influential player in global governance — provided the bloc’s internal fractures can be reconciled rather than merely postponed.
Q. “India’s strategic autonomy in the 21st century is increasingly being expressed through multi-alignment rather than non-alignment.” Discuss.
10 Marks · 150 WordsThe BRICS bank — an alternative that wasn’t
Context
Sushovan Dhar, a member of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), uses India’s chairship to ask a blunt question: seventeen years into the BRICS project, has any of the promised alternative to the Western-dominated financial order actually materialised? His answer is no — and the reasons have less to do with intention than with structure. BRICS countries, for all their rhetoric about reshaping the world, are deeply enmeshed in the very system they claim to challenge, and the institutions they built reflect that.
Key Takeaways & Core Analysis
Launched in 2015 as BRICS’s flagship creation, the NDB was to offer loans without political strings, governance without Western dominance, and financing in local currencies. A decade on, half its outstanding bonds are denominated in U.S. dollars, with the Chinese yuan making up most of the rest and the South African rand accounting for just about one per cent. Local currency lending sat at roughly 22% against a self-set target of 30%, and its first rupee-denominated bond was still at planning stage a full decade after the bank opened.
The NDB courts the same rating agencies — S&P, Fitch, Moody’s — that BRICS governments publicly criticise as biased against developing countries. When agency rules collided with bloc solidarity, the ratings won: in March 2022, days after the invasion of Ukraine, the NDB froze all operations related to Russia — a founding member and 20% shareholder — to protect its own credit standing in New York.
Cumulative NDB project approvals reached about $39 billion by the end of 2024. The World Bank Group commits roughly $100 billion every year — meaning that in a full decade of operation the NDB approved less than what its supposed rival disburses in six months. It also co-finances alongside the World Bank and the IMF rather than offering a genuine alternative to them. The relationship is complementary, not competitive.
The Contingent Reserve Arrangement, established in 2015, is a $100 billion pool of foreign exchange reserves meant to help members weather financial crises without turning to the IMF. It has never once been activated. The fine print explains why: any member drawing more than 30% of its allotted share must first enter an IMF programme. The escape hatch leads back to the institution it was meant to escape.
The 126-point declaration issued at the Rio summit in July 2025 — the bloc’s most comprehensive statement to date — does not contain the word “de-dollarisation” even once. Putin himself stated in November 2024 that Russia had “not sought to abandon the dollar”. India fears trade reprisals from Washington; South Africa considers the idea too risky; China prefers gradual internationalisation of the yuan on its own terms.
What BRICS actually asks for reveals the real position. The declarations at Kazan (2024) and Rio (2025) call for a “quota-based and adequately resourced” IMF — not for the IMF to be replaced, restructured or fundamentally reformed. They are asking for a bigger say within it. The U.S. holds 16.49% of IMF voting rights while major decisions require an 85% supermajority, giving Washington an effective veto. BRICS members have known this for decades, and their official position is still to ask for more chairs at a table whose rules guarantee the outcome will be decided by someone else.
Promise Versus Record
| Institution | The promise | The record |
|---|---|---|
| New Development Bank | Loans without political strings, in local currencies, free of Western dominance | Half its bonds in dollars; ~22% local currency lending against a 30% target; froze Russia operations to protect its rating |
| NDB scale | A rival to the World Bank | ~$39 billion approved in a decade against World Bank commitments of ~$100 billion a year; co-finances with Western MDBs |
| Contingent Reserve Arrangement | A $100 billion safety net letting members bypass the IMF | Never activated; drawings above 30% of allotted share require an IMF programme first |
| De-dollarisation | A common BRICS currency displacing the dollar | Absent from the 126-point Rio declaration; members openly divided on the objective |
| Bretton Woods reform | Replacing a system designed in 1944 by and for the industrialised West | Declarations ask for a “quota-based and adequately resourced” IMF — a bigger seat, not a new table |
Static Dimensions to Revise
- Bretton Woods system and governance deficits: The 1944 architecture; the U.S. 16.49% voting share against an 85% supermajority requirement producing an effective veto; the long-stalled IMF quota realignment that drives emerging market demands.
- Multilateral development banks: Comparing traditional MDBs (World Bank, ADB) with non-Western initiatives (NDB, AIIB) on governance, conditionality and credit standards; why credit ratings constrain what any MDB can lend.
- De-dollarisation: Practical obstacles to scaling local currency cross-border trade — market illiquidity, exchange rate volatility, capital account restrictions and trade imbalances leaving partners with unusable balances.
- Global safety nets: Regional financial arrangements (the CRA, the Chiang Mai Initiative) versus the IMF in addressing balance-of-payments crises; why an RFA linked to IMF conditionality is not an independent safety net.
- Concepts: Reserve currency status and the network effects that sustain it; conditionality; the distinction between complementary and competitive institutions.
India Implications
- The editorial is a useful corrective to the previous two pieces in today’s edition. Where Mohan Kumar sees functional institution-building and the “More heft” editorial sees growing weight, Dhar asks what those institutions have actually done — and a good answer script should be able to hold both readings.
- India’s caution on de-dollarisation is rational, not timid. With the U.S. as a major export destination and a tariff surcharge explicitly threatened against “anti-American” BRICS policies, the cost of leading a currency challenge would fall on Indian exporters first.
- The CRA’s IMF linkage is the sharpest point for an examination answer: a regional financial arrangement that routes back to IMF conditionality above a 30% threshold is a supplement to the IMF, not an alternative.
- The credible Indian objective is therefore incremental — larger quota share, more local currency trade where balances permit, and risk hedging — rather than rupture. Whether that is prudence or a failure of ambition is exactly the question a 250-word answer should engage.
- HP AngleHimachal Pradesh offers a quiet, checkable illustration of the editorial’s thesis at state level. When the state needs concessional development finance, it has historically turned to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank — the World Bank for the Shimla water supply and sewerage reform programme, the ADB for clean energy and tourism infrastructure lending, alongside JICA-assisted forestry work. The New Development Bank, seventeen years into the BRICS project, has not become a routine lender to Indian states in the way the Western-led MDBs are. A student in Shimla drinking water supplied through a World Bank-financed system is, in a small way, living inside the argument Dhar is making.
Conclusion: The gap between rhetoric and record matters. BRICS countries have not built an alternative financial architecture; they have built institutions that operate within the existing one — lending in dollars, deferring to Western rating agencies, designing safety nets that require IMF approval. As India chairs the bloc, the honest question is not whether BRICS can reform the global financial order, but whether its governments have any material interest in doing so, or whether a better seat at the existing table was always the real objective.
Q. “The BRICS financial architecture has emerged as a complement rather than a complete alternative to the Bretton Woods system.” Examine.
15 Marks · 250 WordsQ. Regional financial arrangements are increasingly proposed as substitutes for the global financial safety net provided by the IMF. Critically examine this claim with reference to the Contingent Reserve Arrangement.
10 Marks · 150 Words