(The article was originally published in Indian Express as a part of Dr Ram Madhav’s column titled Ram Rajya on September 12, 2026. Views expressed are personal.)
The Congress leaders were griping at prime minister Narendra Modi’s recent Naraz Fufa – sulking uncle – jibe. What Modi’s jibe meant was that just like in family functions where there will always be an elderly uncle who finds reasons to be upset, some leaders in the opposition always find excuses to be critical about things without any reason. Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram’s comments on the 18th BRICS Summit being held at Delhi this weekend betray that Naraz Fufa tendency if not ignorance about current global geopolitics. Normally, countries take pride in hosting such important multilateral events. But for Chidambaram, the BRICS summit is a useless exercise. “We are part of BRICS, we are part of SCO, we are part of G20, and we are part of QUAD. What benefits are we getting out of that? I can’t see”, he cribbed indignantly in an interaction with a news agency.
BRICS, with eleven countries as members and another ten as partners, and dozens more waiting to join, has emerged as the voice of the Global South today. In the last two decades, it has grown in size and influence and boasts today of representing 50 percent of world’s population, 40 percent of global economy and 26 percent of global trade. In comparison, the G7 grouping of major western powers accounts for less than 10 percent population and around 44 percent global GDP. In a world that has become more multipolar in the last two decades, BRICS is one group that promises to provide greater unity and stability.
India emerged as an important balancing power for many countries in Global South as the US opted to step back from its active role in the world. It assumed Chairship of BRICS in January this year for the fourth time. Through last seven months, the country hosted more than 350 high level engagements across important pillars like political and security, economic and cultural and people-to-people and contributed to the advancement of the BRICS agenda of regional cooperation and development. India hosted these summits thrice before – in 2012 during the UPA regime and in 2016 and 2021 under the present NDA government. When the summit was hosted in 2012, heads of five member countries were only present. But in 2016, Modi Government took special interest in inviting heads of six BIMSTEC neighbours as outreach members. The group grew bigger hence. While the 16th summit in Russia in 2024 saw the participation of highest number of heads of state so far, the Delhi summit is expected to exceed that record.
Modi government adopted innovative approach in choosing expansion of BRICS acronym as the themes of the summits that it hosted. Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions was the theme for the 2016 summit while the same for this year’s summit is – Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. In the face of various economic, technological and trade related disruptions occurring all around, nations have to develop resilience of the highest order to tackle them. As the deep-tech era of artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors and biotechnology dawned, innovation is key to national self-reliance while cooperation is necessary to mitigate the new age divide of tech haves and tech have-nots. A serious ecological crisis looms large over most countries in the world with El Nino threatening food and water security, giving sustainability issues greater urgency for the highly populous Global South.
The global order built in the aftermath of the 2nd World War stands largely dissolved today. A new order is yet to take shape, and the interregnum, marred by conflicts and disorder, looks exactly like how Antonio Gramci, the Italian statesman of last century, described as the “time for monsters”. That makes the functioning of any grouping difficult. The G20 group of nations, world’s most expansive and powerful group, found building consensus a challenge in the last few years ever since the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out. India played a catalytic role both at Bali in 2022 and New Delhi in 2023 to ensure that consensus is achieved in G20 despite heavy tensions and disagreements.
The BRICS summit too is being held under the shadow of the US-Iran conflict, which dragged several other Gulf nations like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, also the members of BRICS, into its vortex. Leaders of Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE converge at the summit in New Delhi for the first time after the conflict broke out in late February this year. Given India’s experience in managing conflicting interests and also given the enormous goodwill and bonhomie that prime minister Modi enjoys with leaders of all these nations, one can hope that the summit would succeed in coming out with a unanimous declaration demonstrating united voice of the Global South.
