Jagannath Panda was quoted by the Indian Tribune about the expanded BRICS
September 21, 2026: Jagannath Panda, Head of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs, was quoted by the Indian Tribune about the expanded BRICS.
It noted that for New Delhi, BRICS plus should not be viewed only through the prism of China’s influence, as the expanded grouping allows India to build coalitions with its new partners.
“New Delhi will host the BRICS Summit this week at a consequential moment for both the grouping and Indian foreign policy. BRICS is no longer the compact five-member forum that India helped build around the politics of emerging economies. Enlargement has given it a much broader geographic reach, greater demographic and economic weight, and an increasingly powerful claim to represent dissatisfaction with the existing international order,” the report mentioned.
According to the report, BRICS plus gives India what the original grouping could not—a broader Global South constituency. At the same time, however, it said, the expanded bloc presents New Delhi with a far more complex task of managing competing coalitions.
“India must manage China without making BRICS China-centric; preserve Russia without inheriting Moscow’s confrontation with the West; accommodate Iran’s interests without turning BRICS into an anti-Western platform; deepen relations with the UAE and other pragmatic middle powers; and engage newer members without allowing continuous expansion to hollow out the grouping,” the ISDP report mentioned.
“The New Delhi summit is therefore important less as a destination than as the beginning of a larger test for Indian foreign policy: how to make BRICS plus serve India’s multipolar strategy without allowing BRICS plus to define that strategy,” it noted.
“An enlarged BRICS connects India more systematically with important states across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the wider Global South. Importantly, many of these do not see themselves as belonging permanently to either a Western or Chinese camp. That matters because India’s own foreign policy increasingly rests on precisely this rejection of binary alignment,” the report added.