Does the New Delhi BRICS Declaration, 2026, signal a shift in Indian foreign policy? The parley between former High Commissioner Ajay Bisaria and professor Happymon Jacob suggests: more style, less substance — but style matters.
On optics, the photo of Modi-Xi-Putin handshakes and the presence of Iran, Russia and China had a distinctly anti-Western flavour. On text, India ensured the declaration stayed within strategic autonomy and multi-alignment, not a pivot.
Three litmus tests: Ukraine, Israel, and payments. On Ukraine, the 2026 text drops references to Ukraine altogether, unlike 2024 in Russia. Bisaria suspects a Russian red line — no condemnation of Russia without one of Ukraine — leading to silence rather than taking sides. That is not neutrality, but multilateral avoidance.
On Israel, the condemnation was unusually strong. Despite PM Modi’s 2020 “shoulder to shoulder” stance with Israel, the declaration’s language tilts toward Palestine. Bisaria argues it is still balanced — it does not abandon the two-state solution — but the tilt reflects BRICS consensus, not Delhi alone.
On de-dollarisation, India killed any one-size-fits-all BRICS payment system. For Delhi, global trade in rupees is fine, but not in yuan. As Bisaria says, India does not want the next big currency to be China’s.
The takeaway: India is more comfortable being non-Western without being anti-Western. BRICS is a political platform, not a security bloc. The declaration is multilateral, symbolic, not very consequential. India’s real diplomacy is still about picking forums — from BRICS to ASEAN to G7 — to maximise trade deals. No shift, just a louder assertion of being a pole in a bipolar world.