BRICS and India: Building Bridges, Banking on Momentum
There is a certain kind of silence that follows a very loud announcement. When the BRICS grouping invited new members into its fold, the world watched the handshakes, the flags and the carefully worded statements. Then the cameras moved on. What almost nobody filmed was the quieter part: the working groups, the drafting sessions, the long afternoons of officials comparing notes on payment systems and development finance. Over the past year, India has worked steadily to build a substantive institutional architecture around the broader objectives and aspirations of the BRICS grouping. Read quickly, that sentence sounds like a press release. Read slowly, it describes something far more interesting, the awkward and necessary passage from a slogan to a structure.
This is the story of that passage, and of the open question hanging over it. Can the momentum be sustained?
From Slogans to Structures
Every coalition begins as a mood. BRICS began with a banker’s acronym and a shared irritation about who gets to write the rules of global finance. For years its summits produced photographs and declarations, and critics joked that the group was a talking shop with excellent catering. The shift now underway is subtler than a treaty and more durable than a communique. It is a shift toward standing bodies: technical committees with terms of reference, workstreams with deadlines, and documents that ministries actually use after the photographers leave. India’s contribution has been less about grand speeches and more about plumbing. Plumbing, as any city planner will tell you, is what makes a skyline possible.
The Currency Question and the Patient Work of Finance
Money is where the rhetoric of any alliance meets the road. The New Development Bank has spent recent years learning how to lend, how to raise capital in difficult markets, and how to convince rating agencies that a club of emerging economies can be boring in the best possible way. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement is the quiet insurance policy nobody discusses until there is a crisis. Alongside these, India has pushed practical experiments in settling trade in local currencies, linking fast retail payment rails with partner countries, and exploring how central bank digital currencies might one day speak to one another. None of this ends dollar dominance tomorrow. That is precisely the point. Serious institution building is cumulative, and India seems to understand that making small systems work is worth more than making large promises.
Expansion: An Invitation and a Puzzle
Welcoming new members changed the arithmetic of consensus. A club of five that moves easily becomes a room of ten that must negotiate every comma. New members bring new markets, new energy suppliers and new political complexities. India has approached this with its familiar instinct for patience, insisting that enlargement must be accompanied by better processes rather than more drama. The puzzle is real. A larger BRICS can claim to speak for the Global South with greater credibility, but only if it can still produce decisions. On that test, the next few summit cycles matter more than any single communique.
Digital Public Infrastructure as a Shared Export
One of India’s most persuasive contributions is invisible to the naked eye. 
The Small Shopkeeper Test
Imagine a trader in Nagpur selling to a buyer in Nairobi who can now settle an invoice without waiting days for a correspondent bank to wake up in another time zone. The sums are small. The meaning is not. Every such transaction demonstrates that cooperation has moved from aspiration to utility. This is the test that political slogans rarely pass. When the machinery of a coalition begins to quietly lower costs for ordinary people, the coalition develops a constituency that no communique can manufacture.
Energy, Trade and the Unglamorous Middle
The news rarely covers fertilizer and shipping lanes, yet these are where populations feel an alliance most directly. Discussions inside the grouping now stretch across energy security, food supply chains, critical minerals and small business finance. India’s framing, that cooperation should deliver measurable improvements in daily life, is practical: it converts diplomacy into a delivery schedule. It also builds constituencies. Farmers, traders and small manufacturers who can point to a tangible benefit become quiet supporters of a project that otherwise exists only in newspapers.
The Lessons of the Sherpas
Diplomacy has its own understory. Sherpas, the negotiators who prepare the ground for leaders, spend their hours on language that newspapers will shorten into a headline. In the past year, India’s officials have treated those hours as an investment, convening working groups on health, agriculture, education, science and technology, and asking each one to produce a deliverable rather than a declaration. The method is unspectacular and effective. Institutional memory is not stored in speeches. It is stored in shared documents, contact lists and the mutual confidence that comes from having solved a small problem together. That confidence is the currency that gets spent when a large problem arrives.
What the Rest of the World Is Watching
Outside the room, other capitals are taking notes. The advanced economies of the Group of Seven watch to see whether BRICS can coordinate on anything that touches trade settlement. Middle powers watch to see whether joining delivers anything beyond a photograph. And countries facing sanctions of their own watch to see whether the group can protect them from financial pressure, a question it can answer only gradually. India’s task is to keep the platform attractive to all of them without becoming anyone’s instrument. That is not a small task. It is, however, exactly the kind of task at which a country that speaks to everyone has an advantage.
The Frictions Nobody Puts in the Joint Statement
Honesty requires naming the headwinds. Bilateral disputes among members do not disappear at the summit door. Sanctions regimes in the wider world complicate banking, insurance and shipping in ways that committees can only partially solve. Different members want different speeds on any move away from the dollar. Some see the group as a counterweight, others as a bridge. India’s own approach leans toward strategic autonomy, refusing to be drafted into anyone’s bloc while still using the group to amplify its voice. That balancing act is sustainable only while all members value the platform more than they value point scoring. 
What Sustaining Momentum Actually Requires
So can the momentum be sustained? Yes, but not by enthusiasm alone. Momentum survives on deliverables: a payment corridor that works, a funded project that opens, a supply chain that holds through a shock. It survives on institutional memory, the unglamorous habit of writing things down and following up. It survives, above all, on trust built between officials who meet at least four times a year, not just leaders who meet once. India’s recent year of quiet building suggests an instinct for exactly this. If the group can keep converting ambition into architecture, BRICS will stop being asked whether it matters. The question will answer itself.
The loud announcement is over. The real work, as always, happens when the cameras have gone.