BRICS Foreign Ministers to Convene in Delhi Amid West Asia Fault Lines

BRICS began as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) in 2006 as an informal grouping of major emerging economies, with South Africa joining in 2010 to form BRICS. The grouping expanded significantly at the 2023 Johannesburg Summit, with six new members invited — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina (Argentina later withdrew under President Milei). Indonesia joined in January 2025, bringing total membership to eleven countries. In 2025, ten "Partner Countries" were also admitted, including Malaysia, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan.

India's foreign policy is built on the doctrine of "strategic autonomy" — maintaining independent foreign policy positions and cultivating relations with multiple major powers simultaneously, rather than aligning exclusively with any one bloc. This approach, rooted in the Nehruvian tradition of non-alignment and updated for the post-Cold War world, allows India to engage with both Russia and the West, and with rival regional powers in the same multilateral forum.

The presence of Iran, UAE, and Saudi Arabia in the same BRICS grouping is historically unprecedented. Iran and Saudi Arabia are the region's two major rival powers — one Shia-majority, the other Sunni-majority — whose rivalry has fueled conflicts across Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria for decades. The UAE, while a close Saudi partner, has pursued increasingly independent foreign policy. A China-brokered Iran-Saudi normalization deal in March 2023 partially reduced tensions, but underlying rivalries remain. BRICS's expansion to include all three simultaneously makes India's forum a unique diplomatic arena.