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BRICS 2026: The Day the Global South Stopped Waiting for Permission

Edited by IndianRepublic.in - Location: New Delhi, Delhi, India

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi a day before the 18th BRICS Summit had formally opened. The readout mentioned something almost nobody noticed, that the two leaders had discussed the conflicts in West Asia and the Black Sea region and their impact on "the safety and security of Indian seafarers." A few hours later, Modi met Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran. The readout said the same thing in different words, that freedom of navigation, freedom of commerce, the safety and well-being of seafarers. The following morning, Modi walked into Bharat Mandapam and proposed a BRICS Seafarers Emergency Support Network.

Two consecutive bilaterals. The same Indian workers named in both. Then a specific institutional proposal in the summit speech the next morning. Nobody connected these three things because everyone was watching Chinese President Xi Jinping's plane land.

Image Source: MEA India
India has over three lakh seafarers on merchant vessels across the world's oceans. This is roughly twelve percent of the global seafaring workforce. When the Black Sea was mined after 2022, Indian seafarers were stranded in Ukrainian ports. When Houthi attacks escalated in the Red Sea, Indian seafarers were on the ships being struck. When the conflict around Iran choked the Strait of Hormuz, Indian seafarers were in the middle of it. Young men from Kerala and Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh were sitting in engine rooms in the most dangerous stretches of water on earth with no multilateral mechanism to protect them. 

Modi used the most consequential diplomatic gathering of his chairship, with Putin on one side and Pezeshkian on the other, the two leaders most directly connected to the conflicts making those waters dangerous, to say that we need to build something for these people.

That is the New Delhi moment everybody missed writing about and it is the key to understanding everything else that happened here. The summit that the world was watching was the one with Xi. That summit matters too and we will get to it but first let us say something about Iran because Iran at this summit was something that demands more than a paragraph in a broader piece.

Masoud Pezeshkian came to New Delhi under sanctions, under the weight of a war his country is navigating, under the shadow of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure. He sat in the Bharat Mandapam hall and said from the summit floor that "sustainable security depends on full respect for national sovereignty and rejecting the model of security for some and insecurity for others." He said peaceful nuclear facilities must be protected from attacks and threats. He said taking practical measures to counter unilateral and inhumane sanctions is a priority for BRICS members. He said the issue of Palestine is a serious test of the credibility and legitimacy of global governance.

These are statements of a country fighting for its survival and its dignity in the same breath. And they found their way into the New Delhi Declaration. Paragraph 22 condemns unilateral sanctions. Paragraph 29 condemns attacks on peaceful nuclear facilities. Paragraphs 30 through 34 address Gaza with language that UNRWA itself could have written. Iran came to New Delhi with its demands and New Delhi gave them a multilateral home, with the UAE in the same room, with Saudi Arabia in the same grouping, and with countries that have full diplomatic relations with Israel signing the same document.

Outside the summit halls, something quieter happened that the Iran Embassy noted. Indian religious leaders expressed empathy for the lives lost in Iran's conflict and drew on the deep civilisational ties between the two peoples. Navroz, Zoroastrian heritage, the Persian that runs through Urdu and through the Mughal court and through the poetry that both countries claim as their own. Long live the friendship between Iran and India, the Embassy posted. It is a rare sentence that has earned the weight it is given.

Now Xi. Beijing also placed weight on this visit and wanted the weight to show. Modi and Xi sat down together for the third consecutive year and the first time on Indian soil in seven years. Two readouts emerged. India said: differences should not become disputes. China said: partners. Same room. Same conversation. Two formulations aimed at two different audiences telling two different parts of the truth.

India is holding a position — peace and tranquility on the border as a precondition that must continue to be earned. The three mutuals Modi proposed — mutual respect, mutual sensitivity, mutual interest — are India's formulation and not a jointly agreed language. China is projecting a direction. Forward. Warmer. The third golden decade. The important consensus that the two countries should be partners. The relationship lives in the gap between them and that gap, read carefully, tells you more about where India and China actually stand than any official statement from either side.

What Xi said in the summit hall is worth pondering over. He offered four formulations for what BRICS must become: a pioneer of innovation-driven development, a pioneer of peace and stability, a pioneer of mutual learning between civilisations, a pioneer of global governance reform. 

The civilisation pillar is the one that will matter most across the coming decade. It is the framing beneath which yoga and Xuanzang and the joint Traditional Medicine cooperation framework and the BRICS Film Festival all find institutional shelter. It is also the framing beneath which India and China can build something together without first resolving where the line runs at seventeen thousand feet in Arunachal Pradesh. You do not need to agree on the LAC to agree that the Mahabharata and the I Ching are drawing from the same ancient source. Xi understands this. Modi understands this. The civilisation formulation is the diplomatic canal they have dug for the water of the relationship to flow through while the rocks are still being moved.

The declaration itself — 140 paragraphs, every one of them signed by all eleven members — is a document whose full significance will take months to absorb. But two paragraphs deserve naming here because they have received almost no attention.

Paragraph 40: all eleven members, including China, condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on April 22, 2025, naming it by date and death toll. The Pahalgam attack. In a document signed by the country that maintains its all-weather strategic partnership with Pakistan. India wrote the agenda. India got that sentence in. It will not be easily taken back.

Paragraph 13: China and Russia, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, reiterated their support for the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role in the UN, including its Security Council. These are the things that will matter when the photographs fade.

Modi told the room that the Global South is today in the front row of global crises but in the back row of decision-making. He called for transforming the pyramid of privilege into a platform of partnership. He proposed ten governance reform proposals for a BRICS Reform Roadmap to be delivered by China's 2027 chairship. He proposed the Continuity and Implementation Mechanism, a digital repository tracking every decision, every nodal point, every timeline, so that the institutional memory does not dissolve each time the presidency rotates. 

Xi accepted the 2027 chairship and said Beijing will seize the opportunity to build consensus. That is now on the record, in front of eleven member states, with the Reform Roadmap mandate formally attached.

So was this a revival of BRICS? The question is slightly wrong because BRICS was never dead, it was the grouping that its sceptics wanted to bury before it had finished becoming what it was. What New Delhi showed is that it has found its register. A forum where Iran and the UAE can sign the same declaration, where China endorses a condemnation of Pahalgam, where Russia and China endorse India's UNSC bid, where a proposal for protecting seafarers in conflict zones emerges from bilateral conversations with the two leaders most implicated in making those conflicts dangerous.

The Bharat Mandapam held eleven nations with profoundly different interests and got them all to sign the same 140 paragraphs. That is messy. That is contradictory. That is the actual world in September 2026, more honestly represented than any single country's foreign policy could manage.

India called the meeting. India wrote the agenda. India got eleven signatures on a document that named Pahalgam, endorsed its UNSC aspirations, condemned the sanctions regime, demanded protection for peaceful nuclear facilities, and proposed a network to protect its workers on the world's oceans. That is what a New Delhi moment looks like when it is something real rather than something performed.

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