Freedom of Choice: BRICS and India’s idea of strategic autonomy

India’s BRICS chairship came at an important moment for both the grouping and Indian foreign policy. New Delhi would host the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12-13, bringing to a close its year-long chairship which began on January 1. This was India’s fourth turn at the helm and coincided with BRICS completing two decades.

The official theme of ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability’ captured the broad ambition of the Indian presidency. Its emphasis on a people-centric ‘Humanity First’ approach is significant because Delhi has sought to move the BRICS conversation beyond the familiar rhetoric of great-power rivalry and towards tangible developmental outcomes. More than 350 meetings have been organised across over 25 Indian cities.

The composition of BRICS has also changed substantially. With 11 full members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia—the grouping is considerably more heterogeneous than its original version. That heterogeneity is its principal strength and its principal constraint. The presence of such divergent political and strategic interests under one institutional umbrella underscores the challenge confronting the Indian presidency: how to make an increasingly diverse grouping consequential without allowing it to become hostage to geopolitical confrontation.

India’s approach needs to be understood within the larger architecture of its foreign policy. Delhi has increasingly moved away from the conceptual binaries of non-alignment and alliance politics towards multi-alignment or multi-engagement. The objective is not to choose between competing geopolitical camps but to construct sufficient room for manoeuvre.

This explains India’s simultaneous participation in the Quad, I2U2, SCO, IBSA, BRICS, the International Solar Alliance, and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, among others.

These platforms are not viewed as mutually exclusive but constitute overlapping instruments through which India advances particular interests while preserving strategic autonomy.

The logic is fundamentally pragmatic. First, India approaches plurilateral institutions in an issue-driven manner. Groupings are useful insofar as they deliver on identifiable interests, whether in technology, trade, energy, security, climate, infrastructure or development finance. The institutional label matters less than the outcomes.

Second, India’s objective is generally the reform of the existing international order rather than its wholesale replacement. Delhi has consistently argued for greater representation for developing countries in institutions such as the UN, IMF and World Bank. At the same time, it has remained deeply invested in economic and technological ties with the West and in an open, rules-based international system.

Third, the emphasis is increasingly on practical cooperation. Digital public infrastructure, cross-border payments, resilient supply chains, green finance, support for small and medium enterprises, disaster resilience and technology access offer more useful measures of the success of plurilateralism than declarations about the emergence of a new world order.

Finally, this approach gives India the ability to balance competing relationships without accepting binary geopolitical choices. This is not strategic ambiguity for its own sake. It is an attempt to maximise agency in an increasingly fragmented international system.

BRICS, therefore, occupies an important but not exclusive place in India’s foreign-policy toolkit. Its principal value lies in its ability to bring together a substantial segment of the emerging and developing world. It provides a forum for discussions on global governance, development finance, trade, energy, technology and the reform of international financial institutions. The New Development Bank gives the grouping an institutional economic dimension while discussions on cross-border payments and alternatives to excessive dependence on existing financial infrastructures reflect a broader concern with resilience.

India, however, has little interest in turning BRICS into an explicitly anti-Western coalition Such a transformation would constrain rather than enhance Delhi’s strategic options. India’s interest is better served by making BRICS a platform for cooperation among emerging economies while keeping the door open to engagement with Western institutions and economies.

This distinction is particularly important in the debate over de-dollarisation. India has an interest in reducing vulnerabilities associated with excessive dependence on any single financial architecture and in improving the efficiency of cross-border payments. Initiatives involving national payment systems and financial infrastructures can have considerable practical value. But this does not necessarily translate into an ideological commitment to dismantling the dollar-centred international system.

The same pragmatism applies to China. BRICS gives India an institutional setting in which it can engage Beijing alongside other major powers, but it does not require Delhi to subordinate its broader strategic interests.

The more consequential opportunity for India may lie in using BRICS to reinforce its claim to leadership on issues affecting the Global South. Food, fertiliser and energy security, access to technology, climate finance, development financing, and greater voice in global governance resonate far beyond the BRICS membership. India’s ‘Humanity First’ framing allows Delhi to position resilience, innovation and sustainability not as abstract diplomatic slogans but as development imperatives. The expanded BRICS also creates an opportunity and a danger. Its larger membership gives the grouping greater geographic and economic weight, but it also makes consensus more difficult. A BRICS that attempts to speak with one voice on every major geopolitical question will struggle to remain coherent.

India’s more realistic objective should be to build coalitions of the willing within the broader grouping and pursue areas where interests genuinely overlap.

There is, ultimately, a larger logic behind India’s approach. Delhi does not see strategic autonomy as isolation from competing centres of power. It increasingly understands autonomy as the capacity to engage multiple centres of power simultaneously without becoming dependent on any one of them. This produces what might appear to be a plethora of ad hoc arrangements. Yet the apparent institutional proliferation serves a strategic purpose. It allows India to shape different agendas in different constellations while retaining the flexibility to shift emphasis.

The Quad serves one set of strategic purposes. BRICS serves another. The SCO provides a different channel for engagement across Eurasia. India’s bilateral partnerships with the US, Russia, France, Japan, the Gulf states and others add further layers to this architecture. The objective is not consistency of institutional alignment. It is consistency of national interest.

BRICS should therefore be understood as complementary to, rather than constitutive of, Indian foreign policy. Delhi values the grouping because it provides access to emerging economies, a platform for Global South concerns, and opportunities for practical economic cooperation. But India has little incentive to allow BRICS to define its external orientation.

For Delhi, the test is not whether BRICS can proclaim the arrival of a new international order.

It is whether it can deliver useful cooperation within the existing one while giving countries of the Global South greater agency in shaping what comes next. That is the logic of India’s plurilateralism: not choosing one camp, but creating enough partnerships to ensure Delhi is not compelled to choose.