India has secured what officials are calling a major diplomatic breakthrough at the 18th BRICS Summit, after negotiators from all 11 member nations reached consensus on a joint statement following intensive talks that stretched from Friday evening until around 4 am on Saturday.
The agreement, reached just hours before leaders gathered at Bharat Mandapam for the summit’s opening sessions, ends months of deadlock that had repeatedly threatened to derail the bloc’s ability to speak with one voice.
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According to government sources, India led sustained consultations through the night to bridge sharply competing positions among BRICS members, with the negotiations described as having seen differences on several contentious issues before agreement was finally reached.
The joint statement, known as the New Delhi Declaration, is expected to be released later on Saturday, the summit’s opening day, and covers a wide range of the bloc’s economic and geopolitical priorities under India’s 2026 chairship.
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The breakthrough carries particular weight because it required bringing together countries with starkly different security interests, most notably Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which are now full BRICS members despite deep divisions over the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran.
The UAE suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran in August after being struck by Iranian missiles since the conflict began, underscoring how far apart the two countries’ positions have drifted even as both sit at the same table within the bloc.
Sources said India’s diplomatic efforts ensured these differences did not derail the wider BRICS process, allowing all members to sign off on common language despite the scale of the disagreement.
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Indian negotiators are understood to have built the declaration around broader principles, including sovereignty, the UN Charter and opposition to unprovoked aggression, rather than language singling out any individual country.
Reuters, citing sources close to the negotiations, reported that the agreed text is unlikely to name any country directly, focusing instead on condemning unilateral war in general terms.
Separately, the declaration is understood to deplore all kinds of aggression without naming any country, while stressing the importance of dialogue and diplomacy in resolving conflict, language crafted specifically to secure sign-off from both Tehran and Abu Dhabi alongside the bloc’s remaining members.
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Saturday’s agreement stands in sharp contrast to India’s earlier struggles to hold the expanded bloc together.
A meeting of BRICS deputy foreign ministers and special envoys on West Asia in April failed to produce a common statement, and the divide persisted at a BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting held in New Delhi in May, when the bloc was forced to issue only a Chair’s Statement and Outcome Document rather than the customary joint communique, the first such failure in the grouping’s history.
Against that backdrop, securing a fully agreed joint statement from all 11 members this time round is being read in New Delhi as a significant vindication of India’s approach to managing the bloc’s expanding and increasingly fractious membership.
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The scale of the diplomatic challenge reflects how much BRICS has changed since its founding in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa as a counterweight to a Western-dominated world order.
The bloc’s expansion last year to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE has given it greater global weight, with its members now accounting for more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and close to a quarter of the global economy, but it has also made consensus far harder to achieve on contentious geopolitical questions.
The summit itself is unfolding against a tense regional backdrop, with the United States and Iran having resumed tit-for-tat strikes in their six-month war after a pause for much of August, and Iran-aligned Houthi rebels tightening their grip over parts of the Red Sea region.
Notably, the UAE opted to send Abu Dhabi’s crown prince to New Delhi rather than a minister, a choice widely read as a signal of how carefully Abu Dhabi is managing its participation in a forum that now also includes Tehran.
