New Delhi Declaration: What BRICS Said, Whispered and Left Unsaid

Every summit communique is an exercise in choosing words, but the New Delhi Declaration is unusually revealing in what it chooses to name and what it leaves in shadow. Adopted by consensus on 12 September 2026 by all members of the expanded bloc, the document runs to 140 numbered paragraphs and touches almost every subject in global affairs, from the Security Council to submarine cables. Yet its real meaning lies in a single pattern. On some conflicts it speaks plainly and names names. On others it retreats into the passive voice. And on one major war it says nothing at all. Read through that lens, the New Delhi Declaration is the clearest map yet of how far this bloc, and its host India, will actually go.

What the New Delhi Declaration Said Plainly

Where BRICS felt safe, it was specific. On Gaza the language is direct and forceful. The Declaration condemns "the use of starvation as a method of warfare" and attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, demands unhindered humanitarian access, and opposes "the forced displacement, temporary or permanent, under any pretext, of any of the Palestinian population" from Gaza.

It goes beyond rhetoric, noting the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice "in the legal proceedings instituted by South Africa against Israel," and restating Israel's obligation to let aid into Gaza. It backs a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and full UN membership for Palestine. On Lebanon it names Israel again, calling on it "to withdraw its occupying forces from all of the Lebanese territories".

India's own priority was named too. It condemns "in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025, during which 26 people were killed," the Pahalgam attack, and carries the language India has long pushed on the cross-border movement of terrorists, terror financing, safe havens, and a rejection of "double standards in countering terrorism." For New Delhi, getting a document signed by China, Russia, Iran and eight others to name an attack on Indian soil was a genuine diplomatic win, and one worth reading closely for what it does not do.

Every summit communique is an exercise in choosing words, but the New Delhi Declaration is unusually revealing in what it chooses to name and what it leaves in shadow. Adopted by consensus on 12 September 2026 by all members of the expanded bloc, the document runs to 140 numbered paragraphs and touches almost every subject in global affairs, from the Security Council to submarine cables. Yet its real meaning lies in a single pattern. On some conflicts it speaks plainly and names names. On others it retreats into the passive voice. And on one major war it says nothing at all. Read through that lens, the New Delhi Declaration is the clearest map yet of how far this bloc, and its host India, will actually go.

What the New Delhi Declaration Said Plainly

Where BRICS felt safe, it was specific. On Gaza the language is direct and forceful. The Declaration condemns "the use of starvation as a method of warfare" and attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, demands unhindered humanitarian access, and opposes "the forced displacement, temporary or permanent, under any pretext, of any of the Palestinian population" from Gaza.

It goes beyond rhetoric, noting the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice "in the legal proceedings instituted by South Africa against Israel," and restating Israel's obligation to let aid into Gaza. It backs a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and full UN membership for Palestine. On Lebanon it names Israel again, calling on it "to withdraw its occupying forces from all of the Lebanese territories".

India's own priority was named too. It condemns "in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025, during which 26 people were killed," the Pahalgam attack, and carries the language India has long pushed on the cross-border movement of terrorists, terror financing, safe havens, and a rejection of "double standards in countering terrorism." For New Delhi, getting a document signed by China, Russia, Iran and eight others to name an attack on Indian soil was a genuine diplomatic win, and one worth reading closely for what it does not do.

Also Read:  Modi, Xi, Putin: The Biggest Challenges Before BRICS in Delhi

What the Declaration Would Only Whisper

The moment the subject turned toward the West's most powerful state, the plain speech vanished. On the strikes against Iran, the Declaration expresses "serious concern over deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency". Every reader knows this describes the American and Israeli bombing of Iran's nuclear sites, yet the attackers are never named, and even the victim is identified only as the owner of "peaceful nuclear facilities." The paragraph before it urges all sides to show "maximum restraint" while "recalling our respective national positions", the diplomatic phrase that lets members who fundamentally disagree paper over the gap and sign the same page.

The same hush falls over economic grievances. The New Delhi Declaration voices "serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules", condemns "unilateral economic sanctions and secondary sanctions" and calls for their elimination, and demands an end to the "unilateral blockade measures" against Cuba. Each of these is a complaint aimed squarely at Washington. Not one of them says so.

The War the New Delhi Declaration Ignored

Then there is the silence. For all its length, the Declaration makes no mention of the war in Ukraine, the largest active conflict involving a BRICS member. The peace and security section moves methodically through West Asia, Iran, Gaza, Jerusalem, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Cuba, but the war Russia is waging simply does not appear. Where earlier BRICS texts at least gestured at it through members' "national positions," this one omits it altogether. That absence is not an accident of drafting. It is the price of Russian membership and of India's refusal to be drawn into criticising Moscow, and it marks, as clearly as any paragraph that is present, where the bloc's convenience lies.

The Country the Declaration Never Names

Put those threads together and one fact stands out above the rest. The United States is not named once in the entire Declaration. Not in the tariff paragraph, not on sanctions, not over the strikes on Iran, not on the Cuban embargo. The document assembles a comprehensive indictment of American economic and military conduct and then declines, everywhere, to write the word.

The contrast with how the New Delhi Declaration treats its own members is telling. It is perfectly willing to name China and Russia when the mention flatters: it credits them for supporting India and Brazil at the UN, praises China for extending "zero-tariff treatment to cover 53 African countries" and for its contribution to the Kunming biodiversity fund. The bloc will name friends in praise but not adversaries in protest. That is the signature of a group that wants the posture of defiance without paying the price of confrontation.

Where the New Delhi Declaration Stands on Dedollarisation

Nowhere is that caution clearer than on the dollar. For all the noise about BRICS building an alternative to the greenback, the Declaration is studiously modest. It acknowledges the work of the BRICS Payment Task Force on cross-border payments and notes "discussions on promoting trade settlements and investments using BRICS local currencies," but immediately hedges that there is "no one-size-fits-all approach" and that national priorities come first.

There is no common BRICS currency, no timetable to displace the dollar, and, once again, no mention of the United States. This is the toned-down dedollarisation India has argued for all along, now set into the outcome document. Even the New Development Bank is urged only to "expand local currency financing", an incremental nudge rather than a rupture. For a summit that the world watched for signs of a currency war, the declaration reads like a decision not to start one.

Also Read:  Modi BRICS Speech: The Global South's Case, Carefully Framed

Multilateralism and the Reform the Declaration Demands

If the declaration is timid on confrontation, it is expansive on reform, and this is the ground on which BRICS is most comfortable. The New Delhi Declaration devotes its opening pages to it, calling for a "more just, equitable ... representative, legitimate, democratic and accountable" international order for greater representation of developing countries in the UN and its Secretariat, and for a comprehensive reform of the Security Council. But even here the ambition is carefully fenced.

China and Russia "reiterate their support to the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role in the UN, including its Security Council", a formula that blesses a vague "greater role" while stopping short of endorsing a permanent seat, leaving India's core demand exactly where it has languished for two decades. On the economic front the Declaration presses for reform of the IMF and World Bank so that voting power reflects "countries' relative positions in the global economy", supports WTO reform and the accession bids of Ethiopia and Iran, and quietly defends South Africa's seat at the G20 against any change not agreed "based on consensus of all members", a subtle rebuke to the pressure coming out of Washington on that forum. The demands are ambitious. The mechanism to force them remains, as always, absent.

Where India Gained, and Where It Fell Short

For India the New Delhi Declaration is at once a showcase and a ceiling. The gains are real. New Delhi steered a consensus text through the sharp Iran-UAE divide over West Asia, secured the naming of the Pahalgam attack, kept the currency language cautious, and stamped the document with its own initiatives: a BRICS Grain Exchange, a Risk Lab at GIFT City in Gujarat, the New Investment Platform, an India Centre for BRICS Industrial Competencies, the chairship of the Kimberley Process on diamonds, and an India-led International Big Cats Alliance. It also anchored a commitment to "implement the BRICS Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence" and won a nod to its AI Impact Summit of February 2026.

The shortfalls are just as real, and the same document records them. The Pahalgam attack is condemned, but Pakistan is never named, so India got the incident without the accusation. The Security Council language flatters India while advancing its seat not at all. And the sweeping reforms the New Delhi Declaration demands remain, as they have for years, aspirations rather than accomplishments. India left with the words it wanted. The substance stayed beyond reach.

What the Summit Achieved, and What It Did Not

The honest verdict on the New Delhi Declaration sits somewhere between triumph and theatre. Its first achievement is simply that it exists. An eleven-member bloc containing states on opposite sides of active wars produced a single consensus document, and for a group this fractured that is not nothing. It let India project real convening power, handed the Global South a long charter of shared demands on governance, trade, health and development, and logged dozens of working groups, task forces and centres of excellence that could, over time, harden into something durable.

What it did not do is act. The Declaration is a document of 140 paragraphs built on "we welcome," "we note" and "we acknowledge," abundant in intent and thin in binding commitment. It named no adversary, resolved no contradiction, and moved no institution from words to obligation. Its very length is not a measure of ambition but of consensus: the more members at the table and the more topics on the agenda, the more diffuse the text has to become for everyone to sign it. It is, in the end, the declaration of a bloc that can agree on what it dislikes far more easily than on what it will do.

What Comes Next

The real test of the New Delhi Declaration begins now, with the summit lights switched off. In his concluding remarks on Sunday, Narendra Modi seemed to concede as much, telling leaders that BRICS "must translate all outcomes into time-bound actions that deliver last-mile impact," an admission that the declaration is only intent until someone acts on it. He has proposed a Continuity and Implementation Mechanism to stop each year's promises from quietly evaporating, and the declaration itself is studded with study groups and roadmaps that will either mature into working institutions or lapse into footnotes.

With the chairship now passing to China for 2027, the burden of turning this text into action moves on with it. Three things are worth watching in the year ahead: whether the payment and local-currency plumbing is actually built or merely discussed, whether the reform demands survive contact with a Security Council and a Bretton Woods system that have no intention of reforming themselves, and whether an ever-expanding BRICS can keep finding language that eleven, and soon perhaps more, governments will all sign.

The likeliest future is neither the triumph its champions proclaim nor the irrelevance its critics predict. It is a bloc that keeps meeting, keeps issuing careful declarations, and keeps making Western dominance a little harder to exercise without ever openly challenging it. The New Delhi Declaration, loud where it was safe, coded where it was not, silent on the war it could not touch, and careful never to name the one power it most wants to constrain, is a faithful portrait of that middle path. India hosted it with skill. What even a skilled host could not do was make a divided bloc braver than the sum of its interests.