BRICS Went From a Wall Street Acronym to 11 Countries. Can India Hold Them Together?

Headlines love a single number: “BRICS is 40% of world GDP.” That statement is only meaningful once you know which GDP it means, because the two standard measures produce very different pictures.

Nominal GDP converts each country’s output into US dollars using current market exchange rates. It reflects a country’s economic weight in global trade and finance as actually transacted.

GDP at purchasing-power-parity (PPP) adjusts for the fact that a dollar buys more in, say, India or Egypt than it does in the United States or Germany. It better reflects the real volume of goods and services a country’s economy produces, but it is not the number that matters for currency markets, debt servicing or dollar-denominated trade.

Because BRICS members are mostly middle-income and emerging economies, their PPP-adjusted GDP is consistently much larger, as a share of world GDP, than their nominal GDP. The two are not interchangeable, and a comparison that silently switches between them — using PPP to make BRICS look big and nominal to make the G7 look big — is misleading even when every individual number is correct.

The CRA, agreed alongside the NDB at Fortaleza in 2014, is a $100 billion pool of committed, not pooled, resources: China committed $41 billion, Brazil, Russia and India $18 billion each, and South Africa $5 billion. It is a pledge to help each other during a balance-of-payments crisis — a member facing currency pressure can draw on partners’ committed reserves — not money sitting permanently in one shared BRICS account.

India and China are BRICS’ two largest economies and its clearest illustration that membership does not equal alliance. The two countries fought a deadly border clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020, maintain a substantial troop presence along their disputed Himalayan frontier, and have layered trade and investment restrictions on each other in the years since — even as both remained fully engaged in BRICS summits, the NDB and the CRA throughout.

September 2026 marks a notable moment in that relationship: Xi Jinping’s visit to India for the summit is reported as his first in roughly seven years, with a Modi–Xi bilateral meeting expected. That meeting, if it happens as reported, would be a genuine data point in the two countries’ slow, incomplete diplomatic thaw over trade, investment access and border-management dialogue — not evidence that the underlying rivalry has ended. Border trust, market-access restrictions and technology competition remain unresolved regardless of what one summit meeting produces.

India’s relationship with Russia — built on decades of defence cooperation, discounted energy purchases since 2022, and long-standing diplomatic trust — continues through BRICS but is not defined by it. Vladimir Putin’s arrival in New Delhi on 11 September 2026 for bilateral talks with PM Modi, covering defence, energy, technology and pharmaceuticals, sits alongside BRICS but is a bilateral relationship in its own right; it marks Putin’s first in-person participation in a BRICS summit outside Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine began. BRICS gives India a continued multilateral forum for engaging Moscow even as Western sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Russia continue elsewhere — but India’s Russia policy is shaped by its own bilateral interests, not dictated by bloc membership.

Iran and the UAE’s confrontation over the 2026 US–Israeli military campaign against Iran and its regional fallout is, on the record, the single clearest example of BRICS’ expansion paradox. Both countries were welcomed into the bloc in 2024 specifically because they deepened its geopolitical and energy-market weight. Sixteen months later, their bilateral confrontation was severe enough to break the foreign ministers’ ability to issue any joint statement at all — twice, first at an April 2026 deputy-level meeting and again at the full ministerial in May. India, as host and chair, had no mechanism to force agreement and issued a chair’s statement instead, an outcome that publicly displayed the bloc’s internal division rather than papering over it.

The Kremlin’s own September 2026 framing is instructive: spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters ahead of the summit that Russia is “not seeking de-dollarisation” as an end in itself and remains open to any acceptable payment method — Russia’s use of national currencies, he said, is a response to being blocked from using others, not an ideological project. That single quote undercuts the common assumption that every BRICS member is pursuing de-dollarisation for the same reason, or at the same pace. India, for its part, has explicitly avoided that framing altogether, preferring to describe its CBDC push as a trade-facilitation measure rather than a challenge to the dollar’s dominance.

“Global South” is a broad, informal political and economic term for developing and middle-income countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America — it has no fixed membership list, no treaty basis and no formal secretariat. BRICS is not a synonym for the Global South, and it does not represent every developing country: dozens of the world’s developing economies are not BRICS members, partners, or even applicants. Using “BRICS” and “the Global South” interchangeably overstates the bloc’s representativeness.