Halfway through India’s year of chairing the body, BRICS has produced a run of ministerial declarations across almost every sectoral track it runs.
Each declaration committed every participating member to shared language on the record, names attached, and each created working groups, frameworks or instruments, from a consensus to study an invoice-discounting mechanism for trade finance to a finalised Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership 2030 for submission to leaders in September.
Over the same period, BRICS held two political meetings on foreign policy. Both ended without a joint statement.
There are two verdicts on BRICS cohesion under India’s chairmanship, and they point in opposite directions. The bloc is not cohering or fracturing; it is doing both at once, and doing each in a predictable place.
Counting agreements and disagreements
Take the outcome documents as the unit of analysis.
More than fifteen sectoral and technical meetings, from energy and health to agriculture and disaster-risk reduction, adopted a joint declaration, statement or communiqué, and the trade ministers added theirs in Jaipur on 7 August. Not one records a difference of view; every signatory commits to shared language with its name attached.
The trade declaration alone carried four annexes, and the finance ministers and central bank governors, meeting in Jaipur on 12 and 13 August, are positioned to make it sixteen.
Political and foreign-policy meetings have produced no agreed joint outcome document. Both produced Chair’s Statements instead. On 24 April, the BRICS Deputy Foreign Ministers and Special Envoys met in New Delhi on the Iran war. India recorded only that members expressed deep concern and offered views “on the matter.” That is diplomatic language for a meeting in which members disagreed.
Three weeks later, the foreign ministers convened on 14 and 15 May. India again issued a Chair’s Statement, running to 63 paragraphs, two of them carrying footnoted reservations. Paragraph 21 recorded “differing views among some members” on the West Asia and Middle East situation.
More than fifteen ministerial agreements, not one qualified by a reservation. Zero on the political side, twice. The bloc fails selectively, on the same file both times it touched high politics.
What broke the political track
On 28 February, the United States (US) and Israel began strikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeted the nuclear and ballistic-missile programme. Within days Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and a similar share of global LNG normally move. The closure hits BRICS members from two directions. India and China are among its largest customers for Gulf crude, while Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) depend on it for export revenues and port economies.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed without Iranian permission, granting passage only to a short list of approved states. A Pakistan-mediated ceasefire collapsed in early April, the US imposed a naval blockade on 13 April, and a June memorandum of understanding briefly reopened the strait before unravelling.
World Trade Organization data records a 95% fall in crude-oil carriers and a 99% fall in LNG carriers since the conflict began, and the UAE’s state oil company does not expect full flows to resume before 2027.
Two BRICS members sit inside that story on opposing sides. Iran struck US military assets in Gulf states, the UAE among them, and accused Abu Dhabi of hosting the launch sites. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi urged the bloc to condemn US and Israeli violations of international law and accused the UAE of direct involvement in the aggression against Iran, naming its provision of bases, airspace, territory and intelligence. No wording survived, and Araghchi afterwards blamed the UAE for the absence of a consensus document.
The same format had managed consensus on this subject before. In September 2025, on the margins of the UN General Assembly, BRICS foreign ministers, the UAE among them, condemned in plain terms the June 2025 strikes on Iran. Eight months later, facing a larger war, the identical format could not produce a single agreed line, because this time one of its own members stood accused of enabling the strikes.
India, as chair, could describe the disagreement but not dissolve it. Its foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, made the problem explicit, reminding members that the advancement of BRICS requires later members to subscribe to the bloc’s consensus. That is as close as a chair comes to admitting that expansion has imported a fault line the format cannot metabolise.
The regime is the wrong shape for the stress
A regime is a set of principles, norms and procedures around which members’ expectations converge. On principles, BRICS is stable: multipolarity, sovereign equality and reform of a governance architecture members regard as Western-designed are held in common without strain. On procedures, it is a consensus body with no enforcement. Consensus without enforcement suits some decisions and not others.
BRICS functions as a working regime on economic and technical cooperation. It does not function as one on high politics.
Where absolute gains are available, rational states cooperate under anarchy, and an institution’s job is to solve the information problem so that they can. BRICS is confirming that expectation one document at a time. The invoice-discounting study and the small-exporter framework leave every member’s firms marginally better off. No member loses relative to another, and consensus follows without a fight.
Where states weigh relative rather than absolute gains, cooperation demands that each party expects to gain at least as much as every other. That criterion does not survive the Hormuz file. Iran and the UAE are not measuring the joint value of a communiqué on West Asia; they are measuring their positions against each other, and a form of words that satisfies one is a concession extracted by the other. Consensus procedure has nothing to grip.
A week after the foreign ministers failed, the Justice Ministers met in Gandhinagar on 21 and 22 May and agreed to a declaration on strengthening mediation and arbitration. BRICS can promote dispute resolution as a service to the world economy, yet it ironically holds no instrument to apply it to itself.
The pattern is therefore selective rather than random, and predictable. Any further expansion that seats additional pairs of regional rivals will deepen the split. The bloc already contains a second such pair in Egypt and Ethiopia, whose dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is unresolved. The economic track will keep delivering; the political track will break in the same places.
Three scenarios for the September declaration
Scenario one is a full negotiated leaders’ declaration, adopted by every member without reservations. The probability here is low: nothing between May and September has moved the underlying alignments. Hormuz has not reopened, and neither Iran nor the UAE has shifted. The only routes are a substantial private concession from one of the two, or language diluted to the point of vacuity, and the second is likelier. Such a declaration would exist and say almost nothing.
Scenario two is a truncated declaration carrying footnoted reservations, the May model raised to leader level, and the most likely outcome. India produces a document all members formally adopt, but the sensitive paragraphs carry footnotes recording individual reservations, and West Asia language appears as the view of “some members.” Summits generate more face-saving text than ministerial meetings, because leaders carry the political cost of going home with nothing. That pressure alone tends to manufacture a document, however heavily qualified.
Scenario three is a Chair’s Statement in place of a declaration. The probability here is moderate. India issues a document under its own signature, setting out views expressed and areas of agreement without asserting collective language on West Asia. Both political meetings in 2026 have already ended this way, so it cannot be waved off. It would mark three consecutive consensus failures under one chairmanship.
Whichever emerges, the text’s shape is already fixed. It will not carry operative language on the Iran war that either Tehran or Abu Dhabi regards as satisfactory. It will not carry a two-state formulation on Palestine that the UAE accepts unqualified: a member reserved on exactly that paragraph in May, and the UAE is the most probable author. It will not go beyond a general call on Ukraine. And it will not establish any crisis-management mechanism, because the bloc has never built one for itself.
[Image: By Government of India – The 18th BRICS Summit in India in 2026, GODL-India, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=184429281]
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