As the leaders of BRICS gather in New Delhi, the grouping is exposing both its ambitions and its contradictions. India wants strategic autonomy, China sees a vehicle for the Global South, Russia seeks resilience against sanctions, and Iran wants protection from financial coercion. The real story is not a new BRICS currency, but the gradual construction of a world that may need the dollar less.
By Friday night, New Delhi had begun to look less like a capital hosting a conference than a city preparing for a gathering of rival powers.
Roads through the diplomatic quarter were being sealed and reopened for motorcades. Police checkpoints appeared around Lutyens’ Delhi. Anti drone systems, snipers and National Security Guard teams were deployed around Bharat Mandapam and the luxury hotels assigned to visiting delegations. More than 25,000 police personnel were involved in the security operation. Along the ceremonial routes, the city had been scrubbed, planted and illuminated: thousands of new plants, freshly painted roundabouts, BRICS banners and LED displays announcing a summit whose political ambitions extend far beyond Delhi.
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Vladimir Putin arrived first. His aircraft landed at Palam in the early hours of Friday, where an honour guard waited on the tarmac before the Russian president was driven into the city. His delegation took over the ITC Maurya, long familiar with high security state visits. Across the diplomatic district, the Taj Palace was prepared for Xi Jinping, due in Delhi on Saturday on his first visit to India in seven years. The Oberoi was expected to accommodate the Iranian delegation, whose president, Masoud Pezeshkian, arrived on Friday for his first visit to India in office.
The hotel map alone captured something of the summit’s peculiar political geometry. Russia at the Maurya. China at the Taj Palace. Iran elsewhere in the capital. Narendra Modi presiding over the gathering at Bharat Mandapam. Around them were leaders and ministers from a grouping that now stretches from Brazil to Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Putin wasted little time setting out what Moscow believed the gathering should be about.
At the BRICS Business Forum, held before the formal leaders’ sessions, he argued that the world economy was shifting away from its old centres of power and accused Western governments of using sanctions, tariffs and other forms of economic pressure to defend their position. Russia wants BRICS to move beyond declarations and become a practical economic network: investment platforms, technology links, infrastructure and payment systems capable of functioning even when Western channels are restricted.
That is the large claim hanging over this summit. But the more revealing story is that the countries gathered in Delhi do not agree on what BRICS is for.
They increasingly agree on what they dislike: an international system in which the dollar, Western financial institutions and Western political influence remain disproportionately powerful. But they disagree profoundly over what should replace it, how quickly that process should move and how much power China should acquire in the process.
Five versions of BRICS
India, the host, is the clearest example.
Indian commentary has been markedly more cautious than the rhetoric coming from Moscow or Tehran. The Indian Express has described the attraction of BRICS precisely in terms of India’s strategic autonomy: the grouping can be non Western without becoming anti Western. Delhi wants room to cooperate with Russia, China and Iran while maintaining deep economic and strategic ties with the United States, Europe and Japan.
That position is not rhetorical hedging. It reflects hard economic interests.
India is interested in local currency trade, faster payments and financial systems that give it options outside the dollar network. But it has little interest in replacing dependence on the dollar with dependence on the renminbi. China is already India’s largest source of imports, while Delhi runs a vast trade deficit with Beijing. Deeper financial integration with China therefore looks very different from New Delhi than it does from Moscow.
The most ambitious Indian proposal at this summit illustrates the distinction. Rather than backing the recurring idea of a single BRICS currency, India is pushing for greater interoperability between national payment systems and, eventually, links between central bank digital currencies. The purpose would be to make cross border payments faster and cheaper. Indian officials have gone out of their way to say that the objective is not to overthrow the dollar.
That is precisely why the proposal matters.
Grand schemes for a common BRICS currency have repeatedly gone nowhere. A web of interoperable payment systems is much less dramatic and much more plausible. If countries can settle more trade directly, use national currencies more often and rely less heavily on Western correspondent banks, they do not need to abolish the dollar to reduce their exposure to it.
China sees the same process through a much larger historical lens.
People’s Daily described BRICS on Saturday as one of the principal platforms for solidarity among emerging economies and the Global South. Chinese state media has repeatedly presented the grouping as an instrument for reforming global governance, increasing the voice of developing countries and shifting influence away from institutions created when Western powers dominated the world economy.
Global Times has gone further, describing China as a stabilising force inside BRICS and arguing that Beijing and Delhi could combine India’s experience in digital public infrastructure with Chinese financial technology and infrastructure. The message is unmistakable: China does not merely see BRICS as diplomatic insurance. It sees it as part of the institutional architecture of a more multipolar world.
Russia’s interpretation is harsher and more immediate.
Russian media has framed the Delhi summit as a test of whether BRICS can translate political weight into economic capability. Kremlin officials have stressed that a number of members face sanctions or restrictions and therefore need ways to settle transactions outside vulnerable channels. Kommersant, however, has also acknowledged the contradiction: the larger BRICS becomes, the more difficult consensus becomes. The grouping now contains states with competing regional interests and very different relationships with Washington.
Iran wants the experiment pushed further still.
Pezeshkian used the Business Forum to call for greater use of national currencies and more diverse payment routes. For Tehran, this is not an abstract debate about the future of monetary order. Iran has spent years living with sanctions, banking restrictions and efforts to limit its access to international finance. A payment network less susceptible to American pressure is therefore a strategic asset.
That difference in motivation matters. For India, financial alternatives provide flexibility. For Russia, they provide resilience. For Iran, they can provide survival.
Brazilian coverage has been more sceptical. Folha de S.Paulo characterised the summit as another demonstration of the bloc’s lack of cohesion, while CNN Brasil emphasised the tensions that expansion has imported into BRICS. Brazil itself is represented by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira rather than President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Yet Vieira has also argued that the grouping’s value lies precisely in placing rival states in the same room, particularly at a moment of conflict in the Middle East.
From rhetoric to machinery
Those divisions will shape what emerges from Delhi.
The leaders are expected to discuss reform of the IMF, World Bank and other multilateral institutions; expansion of local currency settlement; faster cross border payments; energy and food security; technology cooperation; supply chain resilience; development finance and the future role of the New Development Bank.
India is also promoting more practical initiatives: a BRICS Incubator Network, a startup innovation fund and a logistics and supply chain cooperation framework. The last of these has acquired particular urgency as conflict in West Asia has disrupted shipping and pushed energy prices higher. Modi told Pezeshkian on Friday that freedom of navigation, maritime commerce and the safety of seafarers had to be protected.
The most consequential discussions, however, will concern financial infrastructure.
BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors have already called for more representative global financial institutions and for payment systems that are faster, cheaper and more interoperable. Linking central bank digital currencies remains technically difficult. Trust is a larger problem. Iran and the UAE have deep political differences. India remains wary of Chinese financial access. Persistent trade imbalances would require currency swap arrangements and other safeguards.
That is why predictions of the dollar’s imminent demise remain fanciful.
The dollar still benefits from the depth of American capital markets, the liquidity of US financial assets, the scale of dollar denominated trade and the absence of an obvious substitute with comparable reach. BRICS has neither a common central bank nor a unified fiscal system, and its members do not even share a common strategic outlook.
But that may be the wrong test.
A world that needs the dollar less
The more significant possibility is that the world does not replace the dollar at all. It simply builds more ways to operate around it.
That is the quiet logic connecting what is happening in Delhi: India’s digital payment proposals, Russia’s demand for sanctions resistant settlement, Iran’s push for national currencies, China’s effort to strengthen Global South institutions and Brazil’s support for reforming the existing financial order.
None of these countries needs to agree on a single replacement system. They need only agree that dependence on one system creates vulnerability.
By Saturday morning, Delhi was preparing for Xi Jinping’s arrival and the most closely watched bilateral encounter of the summit: his meeting with Modi after years of border tension and strategic distrust. Their relationship embodies the central contradiction of BRICS. India and China are rivals, competitors and, in important respects, security adversaries. Yet both have reasons to preserve a forum that gives them greater influence over the rules of the international economy.
That is why this summit should not be judged by whether it produces a dramatic new currency or a declaration announcing the end of Western financial dominance.
The more important question is whether BRICS leaves Delhi with a little more machinery than it had when its leaders arrived.
If it does, the significance will not be that the dollar has been replaced.
It will be that another part of the world has become slightly less dependent on it.