India has chaired BRICS before — in 2012, 2016, and 2021. Each time, the context was different. Each time, India arrived with broadly the same posture: constructive, consensus-oriented, careful not to let the forum become a vehicle for confrontation with the West. The 2026 presidency is no exception in its instincts. What is exceptional is the environment.

The bloc India inherited on 1 January 2026 is almost unrecognisable from the one it last led. BRICS now has eleven full members — Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the UAE — and ten partner countries added in 2025, including Nigeria, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bolivia. Collectively, its members represent approximately 49.5% of the global population, around 40% of global GDP, and nearly 26% of world trade. This is no longer a forum of emerging economies making aspirational demands of an established order. It is structurally significant in its own right, and its decisions carry weight.

India has moved quickly to set the frame. Prime Minister Modi, speaking at the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025, proposed redefining the bloc's name as an acronym: "Building Resilience and Innovation for Cooperation and Sustainability." It is the kind of soft rebranding India does well — retaining the name while shifting its ideological centre of gravity from confrontation to construction. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar formalised the four presidency pillars at the logo launch in New Delhi in January 2026: resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability.

The DPI Gambit

India's most substantive and distinctive contribution to its 2026 presidency is likely to be its Digital Public Infrastructure agenda. The proposition is straightforward: India built a technology stack — Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, ONDC, ABDM — that delivered financial inclusion, direct benefit transfers, and digital identity at a scale no other country has matched. It now intends to offer this architecture as a replicable model for the Global South, adapted to individual national contexts rather than exported as a fixed system.

This is strategically significant on multiple dimensions. First, it gives India something concrete to offer — not just diplomatic solidarity, but institutional know-how backed by demonstrated results. Second, it positions India as a technological leader for developing nations at precisely the moment when the AI and digital governance debate is being framed disproportionately by American and European interests. Third, it creates a soft infrastructure of alignment that serves India's long-term interests in the Global South far more effectively than any number of declarations.

The Global AI Impact Commons, launched at the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026 with over 80 impact stories across 30 countries, is a preview of this approach. The BRICS presidency gives India a year-long platform to scale it.

The Tightrope

The challenge India faces in 2026 is not enthusiasm — it is coherence. The expanded BRICS contains members with sharply divergent interests on virtually every issue of consequence: Iran and Saudi Arabia share a bloc but not a world view; Russia's presence complicates India's careful maintenance of working relationships with Washington and Brussels; China's ambitions for the grouping — including de-dollarisation and a BRICS payment system — are not India's ambitions.

India has been clear that it opposes positioning BRICS as an anti-Western bloc. Modi's statement that the organisation should not acquire the image of one "trying to replace global institutions" is a policy position, not a platitude. New Delhi's resistance to a BRICS common currency and its scepticism of de-dollarisation proposals reflect a genuine assessment that India's interests are best served by a multipolar world in which it retains room to manoeuvre — not by a new bloc that simply inverts the old power structure.

This is strategically coherent. It is also politically demanding. Within a bloc that now includes Iran and Russia — both subject to Western sanctions — India's studied neutrality becomes harder to sustain as geopolitical pressure intensifies. The Venezuelan question, the maritime exercises controversy in which Iran was asked to withdraw at the last moment, and the divergent positions on UNSC reform all illustrate that the internal diversity India inherited is not merely an administrative challenge. It is a structural constraint on what any BRICS presidency can actually deliver.

What Success Looks Like

India should not measure BRICS 2026 by what it resolves — the structural tensions are not resolvable in a single year. It should measure it by what it institutionalises. Concrete progress on DPI frameworks, AI governance norms for the Global South, New Development Bank financing targets for green infrastructure, and language access tools that bring BRICS deliberations into the twenty-two official languages of India and the dozens of others spoken across member states — these are achievable, meaningful, and distinctly Indian contributions.

The 18th BRICS Summit, to be hosted in New Delhi later this year, is the centrepiece. It is also an opportunity. If India can demonstrate that an expanded, diverse BRICS can produce coherent, practical outcomes on shared development priorities — without fracturing into geopolitical camps or being captured by any single member's agenda — it will have made a genuine contribution to the architecture of the emerging multipolar order.

That is the argument India needs to win. Not just at the summit, but throughout the year.

The Hind covers policy, power, and strategic affairs from India's perspective.