What is the point of Brics?

While India jostles China for influence, some see the bloc as relevant in the Trump era

12 min read

Updated On: Aug 10 2026 | 4:50 AM IST

(From left) South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2024 Brics summit in Kazan, Russia (Photo: PIB)

In February last year, US President Donald Trump said: “Brics is dead.”

Trump then told reporters in Washington, DC, that he would impose 100 per cent tariffs on goods from the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (primary members) if it launched a common currency. To date, it hasn’t. Most countries, whether part of Brics or not, were caught in Trump’s global tariff wars soon after.

Twenty years since Bric (minus South Africa that joined in 2010) was formed on the margins of a United Nations (UN) meeting in New York, the grouping still exists. The first summit was held in Russia in 2009. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the term in 2001, arguing that the four economies would emerge to challenge the G7 economies in the coming decades.

As this year’s Brics summit nears, host India continues to jostle China for influence. Even so, the bloc is relevant in the Trump era, experts say.

Russia, China take note as Iran conflict depletes US weapons stocks

Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to attend the summit in New Delhi over Sept 12-13. If Xi visits India, it would be his first since 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted him for one-on-one meetings in Tamil Nadu. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs typically announces Xi’s outgoing visits only a day or so in advance. Xi has not travelled outside China over the past months, except to neighbouring North Korea recently.

Xi didn’t attend the G20 summit in India in 2023. Instead, Chinese Premier Li Qiang did. Xi also didn’t go to Brazil for the Brics summit last year. Li did. Modi last visited China, his first in seven years, for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in the port city of Tianjin almost a year ago.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi wasn’t present for the Brics foreign ministers’ meeting in India in mid-May. Trump was visiting China at the time. China’s Ambassador to India Xu Feihong attended the India meeting in Wang’s place. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Wang met on the sidelines of the Brics national security advisors’ (NSA) meeting in New Delhi in June. After which, during a news conference, Randhir Jaiswal, spokesman, Ministry of External Affairs, described the meeting as constructive.

Last August, Doval and Wang met in Delhi for the Special Representatives’ Talks, the highest formal bilateral channel for discussion on the border dispute.

Today, a calmer border, China’s liberalisation of tourist visas for Indians and the ongoing Chinese-language public outreach programme by the Indian embassy in Beijing all suggest that India-China relations are in a good place. They are when viewed against the backdrop of the Galwan River valley clashes that killed at least 24 Indian and Chinese soldiers in 2020.

But that doesn’t mean Brics is frictionless. India and China are in “a cooperation-versus-competition situation”.

The bilateral factor

India is wary of China’s interest in including its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) allies to the grouping to expand it further, according to Indian foreign policy analysts.

China has also been strongly lobbying for Pakistan’s entry and Russia Türkiye’s. While historically concerned about China-Pakistan relations, India isn’t keen on Türkiye’s inclusion because of the West Asian country’s military support to Pakistan during the four-day India-Pakistan conflict last year.

“For India, these are principals at bilateral levels,” Srikanth Kondapalli, professor, China studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, said.

On the core “boundary question”, for instance, Chinese leaders have referenced an “early harvest”, which translates to first settling the least difficult part of the dispute — the middle sector and leaving the eastern and the western sectors for later. India has long rejected a piecemeal approach, because such a settlement has consequences for its national security. During former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s ice-breaking visit to Beijing in 1988 (the first after the 1962 war), China’s then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping proposed a “package deal” (mutual concessions in the east and the west), but India didn’t accept it and sought to first normalise ties and set up mechanisms for border talks.

India’s approach is delimitation — defining the line and its demarcation over the next 10-15 years or so — pending a final settlement, Kondapalli said.

China formally submitted the “early harvest” proposal to India in 2019. The Galwan clashes shelved negotiations but underscored the severity of the Chinese challenge, according to a paper by the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think-tank.

Other creases in the relationship include China building a mega-dam in Tibet on the Yarlung Tsangpo River that flows into India as the Brahmaputra. India fears China could control the water, which isn’t too far from the border. Then, in the first quarter of last year, China said it issued some 85,000 visas to Indians. Comparatively, India issued fewer visas to Chinese.

“The relationship is not getting worse. It’s stabilising and on an upward trend,” Andy Mok, senior research fellow, Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank, said.

China has taken “a pragmatic position” of discussing the border and other issues in parallel, he said, adding India has resisted that.

At Brics and elsewhere, China and India are in competition for economic and geopolitical leadership of the global south.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, a US-based think-tank, the internal differences were visible in a Brics foreign ministers’ meeting in New York in September 2024 when the group failed to agree on new additions to the UN Security Council (UNSC). Other than India, Brazil and South Africa want permanent seats.

China, which is a UNSC member, has long raised objections to India’s bid. The other permanent members Russia, the US, the UK and France have backed India.

As an aspiring superpower, China shapes the agenda of Brics (like the SCO). But India is not totally without leverage. Although it should not vie for leadership of the global south at this stage of its development, B R Deepak, professor, Chinese studies, JNU, said. “Until then, ‘hide your strength, bide your time’.”

The adage is a former Chinese leader’s foreign policy tip to officials.

Many developing countries rely on China for export and supply chain. Can India do anything about it? Perhaps in the next 10 or 20 years, when it becomes more developed, Deepak said.

The coming Brics summit might witness more of the competition for the global south leadership. In addition to military power and economic heft, China has an advantage through spending on projects, Kondapalli said.

Brics was created because international institutions, dominated by Western powers since the end of World War II, were out of touch with the requirements of developing countries.

China is an institutional player, Mok said, be it at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or the SCO or Brics. “There are overlaps, certainly, but the thinking is not the Western either/or.”

China has brought its BRI partners into the grouping, at times to India’s displeasure. That framing gets the causation wrong, Mok said, adding that the developing countries want in.

“It is not a strategy to isolate India; India is reading initiative into something that is substantially pull, not push.”

The US once held executive power across all major financial institutions and decided when to open the doors to others. Brics is not that, he added.

Presently, US and European immigration tightening is redirecting talent that would once have gone to Boston or Berlin, Mok said. That talent and the capital following it, is moving within the global south rather than out of it. Investment, trade and people flows are no longer bound by the old geography. “What happens between China and India shapes the grouping, overall.”

China sees the US as a global challenge and India as a regional challenge.

Multilateral issues

Other than the five primary members, Brics now has Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), taking the count of full members to 11. Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam are the 10 “partner countries”. The grouping represents more than 49 per cent of the world population and covers 40 per cent of the global gross domestic product (GDP) and 26 per cent of trade.

But the bloc’s differences go beyond India and China to issues such as relations with the United States (US), Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and more recently the Iran war.

At this year’s summit, a joint statement on the ongoing war will be a challenge for the grouping. As things stand, China and Russia will side with Iran while US allies in West Asia such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia will oppose. That will place India in a tight spot.

If “Russian participation” in the Iran war continues (it has helped with electronic warfare), Putin’s position will tilt more towards China, which won’t be good for India, Kondapalli said.

Two geopolitical crises this year that affected Venezuela and Iran showed India at a disadvantage, Deepak said. China, which has greater refining capacity, bought crude oil from the two countries after US actions at discounted rates in Chinese currency (renminbi). China has investments in different parts of the world that India still doesn’t.

But Brics is an alternative for the developing world in the Trump era.

The grouping’s combined GDP is between $29 trillion and $30 trillion, in nominal terms.

Countries that once saw the US as a reliable partner — economically and in geopolitical-security terms — no longer see it that way. That is one reason behind the bloc’s expansion, Mok said.

Brics also seeks to coordinate economic policies of its member countries, and has made financial institutions such as the Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB), formerly the Brics bank. Its first president was an Indian banker.

But what is Brics’ actual agenda? It depends on who you ask. There should be frameworks for general direction and stability, but the grouping should also be dynamic, Mok said.

What more can it do? Consider the NDB. What does it want to be — a networking platform or a source of capital? Mok said. The world is changing through artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Brics can address demographic challenges in the developing world with smart drones and humanoid robots, including for managing natural disasters. The cost will be substantial, but the two major actors can leverage AI, he said.

India and China hosted global AI conferences last year and this year.

China wants to sell its commercial AI overseas.

The Brics heads of state meet annually when member countries take turns to host summits.

But the bloc needs to identify specific things to do. Today, it is largely a framework that can be implemented in very different ways.

Although some analysts warn that the bloc could undermine the Western-led international order, sceptics say its ambitions to create its own currency and develop a workable alternative to existing institutions face potentially insurmountable challenges, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The NDB has approved loans worth some $39 billion since the bank started operating in 2015, according to the bank’s 2024 annual report.

But it can do more on climate-financing, for instance, Deepak said.

India was keen to work with China on the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement (1997) to set global emission-control targets. For a while, India and China, among the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases, coordinated positions, telling developed countries that they owed far greater responsibility for industrialisation. Then, China cut its own deal with the US.

Now, China and Russia are keen to reduce the dependence on the US dollar. But India and Brazil face “potential currency manipulation” if they go along with a Brics currency, which will likely be the renminbi, because it’s the strongest in the developing world, according to both Indian experts.

“Brics is not about India versus China as it is about China versus the rest,” Deepak said.

China is taking advantage of its massive dollar reserves and Trump’s apparent interest in the great-power equation. China is also pushing its cross-border interbank payment system as a Brics-aligned alternative to Western systems.

“India doesn’t find that appealing,” Kondapalli said.

The currency issue is sensitive for India, which has said no to the de-dollarisation move by China and Russia, also because India doesn’t see Brics as an anti-Western bloc.

Since former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government in New Delhi, India’s main Brics engagements have been with the NDB. Unrelated, India has yet to produce a plan to turn the rupee into a global reserve currency (the rupee-renminbi exchange rate was almost 15 towards the end of July).

The NDB and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) are meant to compete with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, respectively. But neither has made a big splash, according to a 2024 paper by Stewart Patrick, senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The NDB, which also includes several non-Brics countries as shareholders, remains undercapitalised, having disbursed over the past decade only a third of the funds the World Bank committed globally in 2021 alone, he wrote. The CRA is a self-insurance arrangement to address potential

short-term balance of payments pressures. Shareholders contribute capital to the CRA and in exchange can secure modest resources when facing liquidity crises.

“And, contrary to the Brics group’s egalitarian rhetoric, the NDB has a weighted voting formula not unlike the Bretton Woods institutions.”

Brics members hope that alternative lending institutions can invigorate south-south cooperation and reduce dependence on traditional funding sources, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The bloc’s annual foreign direct investment inflows more than quadrupled from 2001 to 2021, though they have slowed in recent years.

From India’s perspective, Brics has moved from its founding ideas of emerging economies to become a forum where Chinese and Russian interests dominate, the Indian experts said.

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Written By :

Satarupa Bhattacharjya

Satarupa Bhattacharjya is a journalist with 25 years of work experience in India, China and Sri Lanka. She covered politics, government and policy in the past. Now, she writes on defence and geopolitics.

First Published: Aug 10 2026 | 4:50 AM IST

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What is the point of Brics?

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