BRICS Summit 2026 in India: All 11 Countries, Leaders, Agenda and What the World Is Watching
New Delhi is humming with a kind of energy that only comes around once in several years. Security cordons have been set up around Pragati Maidan, traffic diversions are running across central Delhi, and aircraft carrying heads of state have been landing at Palam one after another since the evening of September 10. For two packed days on September 12 and 13, 2026, the Indian capital has become the diplomatic centre of the world. The 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit is underway at Bharat Mandapam, and India is in the chair.
This is not just another international conference. The 2026 summit marks twenty years of BRICS as a formal bloc, India's fourth turn as its chair, and the first full leaders' gathering of what is now a dramatically expanded grouping. BRICS today is not the cosy five-nation club of its early years. It is an eleven-member body with ten additional partner countries, stretching across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Together, these nations account for roughly 49 percent of the world's population, 40 percent of global GDP, and 26 percent of international trade. By purchasing power parity, the grouping has already surpassed the G7 in economic size. When these leaders sit down together, what they say and agree upon genuinely moves markets and shapes international policy.
What Is BRICS and How Did It Get Here
BRICS began as an investment thesis. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill coined the acronym in 2001 to describe the four largest emerging economies he believed would reshape the global order: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The countries liked the idea enough to formalise it, and the first BRIC summit took place in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2009. South Africa joined in 2010, adding the S and completing the name the world now knows.
For most of the following decade, BRICS was a forum that met annually and produced declarations that largely went unnoticed. It had its uses, particularly in pushing the conversation on reform of Western-dominated institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations Security Council. But it struggled to translate collective economic weight into genuine geopolitical coordination.
The transformation began at the 2023 Johannesburg summit, when BRICS announced that six new countries had been invited to join. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were set to come aboard on January 1, 2024. Argentina had also been invited but withdrew after a change in government. Indonesia joined as the tenth additional member in January 2025. That same year, the bloc created a new category of partner countries and welcomed ten more nations into the fold. The BRICS that gathered in Rio de Janeiro under Brazil's chairship in 2025 was already a strikingly different organisation from the one that had met in Johannesburg two years earlier. The New Delhi summit in 2026 is the first time the fully expanded grouping has convened under a new chair, and India has made sure it counts.
India's 2026 BRICS Chairship
India assumed the BRICS chairship on January 1, 2026, the fourth time it has held the rotating presidency after 2012, 2016, and 2021. The theme Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government chose is "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability," which spells out BRICS itself, a deliberate piece of messaging that reflects the people-centric, humanity-first approach India wanted to project throughout the year.
The chairship has been anything but ceremonial. India organised more than 350 BRICS-related meetings and high-level engagements across more than 25 cities during 2026, covering areas including urbanisation, education, science and technology, labour and employment, youth affairs, and financial cooperation. A final meeting of BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors was held in Mumbai on September 9 and 10, just days before the leaders arrived in Delhi. The summit at Bharat Mandapam is the culmination of that entire year of work, and Modi will be hosting the gala dinner for all leaders on the evening of September 12 as a personal expression of that hospitality.
The Summit Venue: Bharat Mandapam
The 18th BRICS Summit is being held at Bharat Mandapam in Pragati Maidan, the same world-class convention complex where India hosted the G20 Leaders' Summit in September 2023. The venue is now firmly associated with India's most ambitious international diplomacy. It has the infrastructure, the security perimeter, and the logistical scale to handle delegations from dozens of countries simultaneously, and for this summit it is doing exactly that. The BRICS Business Forum, which focused on agriculture, trade, investment, supply chains, and the digital economy, was held at the same venue on September 11, the day before the leaders' summit formally opened.
All 11 BRICS Member Countries and Their Leaders
Brazil is a founding member of BRICS and held the bloc's chairship in 2025, hosting the Rio de Janeiro summit that formally welcomed Indonesia as a full member and inaugurated the ten partner countries. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will not be attending the New Delhi summit in person. He is staying in Brazil ahead of national elections, with his likely only international trip before polling day being the UN General Assembly debate in New York later in September. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira is leading the Brazilian delegation in Delhi and is expected to advocate for continued reform of the UN and the World Trade Organisation.
Russia arrives in New Delhi with considerable symbolic weight. President Vladimir Putin landed in the Indian capital on the morning of September 11 for a three-day visit, and his presence is being noted for a specific reason: this is his first in-person attendance at a BRICS summit held outside Russia since the Ukraine war began in February 2022. The bilateral meeting with PM Modi was held on September 11 at around 3:30 in the afternoon, focusing on trade, energy, defence cooperation, and the broader strategic partnership. India has significantly increased its purchases of Russian oil since 2022, and both countries have been working together to develop mechanisms for settling trade in currencies other than the US dollar. Putin's willingness to travel to India, and the scale of engagement Modi has offered him, speaks to just how central the Russia-India relationship remains for both sides.
China's President Xi Jinping is the name that has dominated every pre-summit conversation, and with good reason. His attendance is confirmed, and it would mark his first visit to India in seven years, since his 2019 informal summit with Modi in Mamallapuram on the Tamil Nadu coast. The years between that visit and this one were turbulent. The Galwan Valley clash in June 2020 killed soldiers on both sides and sent bilateral relations into a deep freeze. A slow, careful process of de-escalation has been underway since then, and the Modi-Xi bilateral scheduled for September 13 at 5:45 in the afternoon is being watched as a potential milestone in that process. Reports suggest Xi is arriving with a delegation of more than 400 officials, more than double the contingent he brought to India in 2019, a detail that speaks to the seriousness with which Beijing is treating this engagement.
India is the host country and PM Narendra Modi is the summit chair. Modi has had an extraordinarily busy few days leading into September 12, with bilateral meetings with Putin and Iranian President Pezeshkian already completed on September 11, and the Xi Jinping meeting coming on the second day of the summit. His role is not just ceremonial. India is actively trying to shape the agenda, steer the New Delhi Declaration toward concrete outcomes on digital payments and trade, and position itself as the voice of the Global South in a world that is rapidly reconfiguring.
South Africa is a founding BRICS member, having joined in 2010, and President Cyril Ramaphosa is attending the New Delhi summit. South Africa hosted the pivotal 2023 Johannesburg summit where the expansion was announced, and Ramaphosa was at the centre of that decision. His presence in Delhi underscores the continuity of African engagement with the bloc at the highest level.
Egypt joined BRICS on January 1, 2024. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is expected in New Delhi, and his presence carries significant weight given Egypt's position at the intersection of Africa and the Arab world, its control of the Suez Canal, and its proximity to the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Egypt's perspective on the Middle East crisis will be one of the most important inputs into whatever language the New Delhi Declaration uses on that subject.
Ethiopia was among the original invitees from the 2023 Johannesburg summit and formally joined BRICS in January 2024. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is expected to attend, representing one of sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing economies and giving BRICS an important foothold in East Africa.
Indonesia is the newest full member of BRICS, having officially joined in January 2025. President Prabowo Subianto, who took office in October 2024, is attending his first full BRICS summit as a member state leader. Indonesia's inclusion brings Southeast Asia into the bloc's core membership and adds the world's fourth most populous country to a grouping already defined by sheer demographic scale.
Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian is attending the New Delhi summit, a visit that is his first to India as Iranian president. Iran joined BRICS on January 1, 2024, and its membership has been one of the most consequential and complicated developments in the bloc's expansion. Iran is under extensive Western sanctions. The ongoing conflict involving Iran in the Middle East has created real tension within BRICS, where the UAE and Saudi Arabia, also members, have very different perspectives on the situation. How the summit handles Iran's presence and whether the New Delhi Declaration can find language on the Middle East that all eleven members can live with will be among the defining tests of India's chairship.
The United Arab Emirates joined BRICS on January 1, 2024, and has been an active participant in BRICS-related activities throughout India's chairship year. The UAE is a global financial hub whose economic reach extends across trade corridors that matter deeply to BRICS' ambitions on digital payments and cross-border investment. The specific leader attending from the UAE has not been formally confirmed in official scheduling documents at the time of writing, but the country's delegation is present.
Saudi Arabia is the most complicated entry on the member list. It was invited to join in 2023 and technically accepted membership, but Riyadh has been cautious about full engagement, particularly given its close ties with the United States. Saudi Arabia appears on India's official BRICS presidency list but has not confirmed a formal delegation for the New Delhi leaders' summit.
The 10 BRICS Partner Countries
The second day of the summit, September 13, opens up to include leaders from the ten BRICS partner countries that were admitted in 2025. Several are attending at head-of-state or head-of-government level. Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko is expected in New Delhi. Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is also expected to attend. Malaysia's Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is on the list of expected attendees, as is Thailand's Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sits across both lists as a full member attending the expanded session. The other partner countries, Bolivia, Cuba, Nigeria, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, are expected to send senior representatives. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is also expected to participate in the second day's open session, and the participation of institutions like the World Trade Organisation and World Health Organisation further underlines the scope of the New Delhi summit.
The Agenda: What Is Actually Being Discussed
India's chairship has been guided by four pillars: resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability. The summit agenda reflects all four, but certain issues are commanding most of the attention.
The push for cross-border digital payment interoperability is one of the most concrete and consequential proposals on the table. India's Unified Payments Interface has been cited as a working model for how national payment systems can be made to talk to each other across borders, allowing businesses and individuals to transfer money more easily without depending exclusively on traditional international channels like the SWIFT network. The 2025 BRICS declaration in Rio already established a formal basis for discussing this, and India is pushing for meaningful progress in New Delhi. It is worth being clear about what this is and is not: this is not a proposal for a single BRICS currency. The Kremlin itself, through spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, has said Russia does not seek de-dollarisation and remains open to acceptable payment methods. What is being proposed is smarter settlement between countries in their own currencies, a shift that could gradually reshape how the bloc conducts trade without requiring anything as dramatic as a common currency.
Trade and investment cooperation is on the agenda at a moment when US tariff escalation has created headwinds for global commerce and disrupted supply chains that BRICS economies depend on. Brazil pushed the BRICS Grain Exchange concept during its 2025 chairship, and India is expected to carry that forward. The broader goal is to build intra-BRICS trade corridors that reduce dependence on intermediaries and infrastructure controlled by Western-aligned economies.
Global governance reform is the perennial BRICS theme, and 2026 is no exception. The argument is straightforward: the IMF, World Bank, and UN Security Council were designed in 1945 to reflect the world as it was then, not as it is now. BRICS collectively represents nearly half of humanity and a growing share of global economic output, yet these institutions still tilt heavily toward the United States and European powers. The New Delhi Declaration is expected to include strong language on this, though the specifics of what any declaration can actually commit to remain limited by the consensus-driven nature of BRICS.
The Middle East conflict is the most divisive subject at the table. Iran is a member of BRICS. So are the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which have significantly different views of Iran and of the conflict now engulfing the region. Egypt shares a border with Gaza. The BRICS foreign ministers who met in New Delhi in May 2026 could not agree on a joint communiqué, a failure that exposed the fault lines running through the expanded bloc. The leaders' summit will attempt to find language everyone can sign, but it is not guaranteed, and the wording of any statement on the Middle East in the New Delhi Declaration will be read very carefully by diplomats around the world.
Ukraine is the other conflict looming over the summit. Putin is physically present in New Delhi for the first time at a BRICS summit outside Russia since the war began. Expect the declaration to acknowledge the humanitarian situation without naming Russia's actions directly, a formula BRICS has used consistently since 2022.
Energy and food security, climate change, technology cooperation, and counterterrorism are also on the agenda, and India's chairship has done significant preparatory work across all of these domains through the 350-plus meetings held during the year.
The Bilateral Meetings That Could Change Things
The formal summit sessions matter, but so do the conversations happening on the margins. PM Modi is running an unusually packed bilateral schedule. The meeting with Putin on September 11 at 3:30 in the afternoon focused on trade, energy, and defence ties that define one of India's most important strategic relationships. The conversation with Iranian President Pezeshkian later that same evening at 6:15 PM addressed a relationship that India has navigated carefully given its stakes in the Chabahar Port project and its complex balancing act between Iran and the US.
But the meeting everyone is watching most closely is the one scheduled between Modi and Xi Jinping on September 13 at 5:45 PM. Relations between India and China have been healing slowly since the 2020 Galwan confrontation, and a substantive, positive bilateral in New Delhi would be the most visible signal yet that the two Asian giants are genuinely working to rebuild trust. Xi's delegation of more than 400 officials is being read by analysts as an indicator that China is not treating this as a routine summit visit.
Why This Summit Is the Most Important BRICS Has Ever Held
Three things give the New Delhi 2026 summit a significance that no previous BRICS gathering has quite matched. First, it is the twentieth anniversary of BRICS as a formal grouping, a milestone that gives leaders reason to look back at how far the project has come and forward at where it is trying to go. Second, this is the first full summit of the expanded eleven-member bloc under a new chair, meaning India has to demonstrate that a more diverse, more geopolitically complex BRICS can still produce meaningful outcomes. Third, the external environment is unusually turbulent: two major wars are ongoing, the global trading system is under stress from US tariff policy, climate commitments are being tested, and the international financial architecture is under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.
India's approach to all of this has been to position itself as a bridge. Modi's foreign policy has maintained strategic autonomy as its north star, meaning India has deepened its relationship with Russia without abandoning its partnerships with the United States and Europe. It has engaged China diplomatically while maintaining firm positions on the border. It has welcomed Iran into the BRICS fold while managing its own very different set of relationships in the Gulf. Hosting this summit at this moment, with this guest list, is the fullest expression of that foreign policy philosophy India has ever staged.
The New Delhi Declaration
The summit will close on September 13 with the release of the New Delhi Declaration, the joint statement that captures what the leaders agreed on. Given the divisions exposed in May, getting all eleven members to sign a unified document on the full range of issues will require significant diplomatic skill. The declaration is expected to be strong on economic cooperation, digital payment interoperability, trade, and governance reform. On conflict-related issues, the language will almost certainly reflect carefully negotiated compromises that all parties can live with, even if none of them would write it that way independently.
Whatever the declaration says, the summit itself is already a statement. New Delhi in September 2026, with Putin and Xi and a dozen other leaders gathered around the table that India set, is a picture of a world that is genuinely multipolar in ways it simply was not a decade ago. The Global South is not asking for a seat at the table any more. It is setting the agenda, pouring the tea, and hosting the dinner. That, more than any specific clause in the New Delhi Declaration, is what the 18th BRICS Summit means.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is the BRICS Summit 2026 being held? The 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit is taking place on September 12 and 13, 2026, at Bharat Mandapam in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, India.
How many countries are in BRICS in 2026? BRICS currently has 11 full member countries and 10 partner countries. Together they represent roughly 49 percent of the world's population and 40 percent of global GDP.
Who is hosting the 2026 BRICS Summit? India is the BRICS chair for 2026, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is presiding over the summit. It is India's fourth time holding the BRICS chairship.
Which leaders are attending BRICS 2026? Confirmed and expected leaders include Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping, Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa, Egypt's Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Indonesia's Prabowo Subianto, and Ethiopia's Abiy Ahmed, along with partner country leaders including Belarus' Lukashenko, Kazakhstan's Tokayev, Malaysia's Anwar Ibrahim, and Thailand's Anutin Charnvirakul.
What is the theme of BRICS 2026? India's theme for the year is Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, which spells out BRICS itself.
Is Brazil's president attending the summit? No. President Lula da Silva is staying in Brazil ahead of national elections. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira is representing Brazil in New Delhi.
When is Xi Jinping meeting PM Modi? The Modi-Xi bilateral is scheduled for September 13 at 5:45 PM. It would be Xi's first visit to India since 2019.
What is the New Delhi Declaration? It is the joint statement to be released at the close of the summit on September 13, reflecting the key commitments and positions agreed upon by BRICS member countries.