A geopolitical read on the New Delhi Declaration, Modi’s balancing act, and what it tells us about the shape of the emerging world order.
A Year Ago, in Rio
Go back fourteen months, to July 2025. BRICS leaders had gathered in Rio de Janeiro just weeks after Israel and then the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities in what became known as the “12-Day War.” The Rio Declaration did something unusual for a bloc famous for diplomatic mush: it took a side, in writing. “We condemn the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” it stated, adding grave concern over attacks on civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities. Iran’s foreign minister publicly thanked the bloc. It was about as clear a condemnation of American and Israeli action as a group containing several US security partners had ever signed.
That was Rio. What happened between Rio and Delhi says more about how India runs its foreign policy today than almost anything else this year.
The War That Changed the Question
On 28 February 2026, the conflict reignited, far more gravely. The US and Israel struck Iran again, this time killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with Iran’s top military and defense officials. Iran retaliated against American bases across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, hit oil and gas facilities, and effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, the channel carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, for months at a stretch.
BRICS could not agree on a single sentence about it. When foreign ministers met in May 2026 to draft language, talks collapsed: Iran wanted explicit condemnation of the US and Israel, exactly as in Rio; the UAE, hit by Iran’s own retaliation and host to American forces, wanted equal condemnation of Iran. Since BRICS runs on consensus, one veto sinks the document. It sank. Jaishankar was left issuing a face-saving “Chair’s Summary” instead of a text every member had signed. For months, it looked entirely possible BRICS would host its biggest summit in years with Xi, Putin, and Iran’s president all attending without producing a joint statement at all.
Delhi Finds a Way
It didn’t happen. On 12 September 2026, Modi announced the New Delhi Declaration had been adopted unanimously, Iran and the UAE included, after back-channel negotiations reportedly still being worked hours before the announcement. Indian officials compared the save to India’s 2023 G20 presidency, when New Delhi found wording on Ukraine that nobody thought achievable.
But the language that emerged is, by every account, considerably softer than Rio’s plain “we condemn.” Early drafts reportedly used language closer to “deplore unprovoked aggression” before being walked back; the final text appears to avoid naming an aggressor at all, built so both Iran and the UAE could claim they weren’t ignored, without either getting the clean win Rio had handed Iran the year before.
Rio condemned. Delhi mediated. The country holding the gavel moved the needle.
The Tell Nobody Should Miss
The Friday evening before the summit, Modi held a private bilateral with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, warm enough that Pezeshkian became the only visiting leader granted a separate meeting with President Murmu, a pointed gesture toward a leader who’d arrived months after his own Supreme Leader was killed in a war. But in that same meeting, Modi reportedly raised something less comfortable: the need for “free navigation and commerce” in West Asian waters – a direct nod to Iran’s own closure of Hormuz, the very chokepoint through which most of India’s oil flows. In one evening, India managed to be Iran’s most solicitous host and the one leader quietly telling Tehran to reopen the water it had shut.
The Theory Underneath It All: Multi-Alignment
None of this makes sense without India’s operating framework – “strategic autonomy,” or multi-alignment: dealing with every major power on transactional terms, never letting one relationship define the whole. Buy Russian oil at a discount. Negotiate trade with Washington. Manage wary coexistence with Beijing. Host the room where all of them sit together.
The US tariff saga shows the method clearly. In 2025, Trump hit India with a 25% tariff, then stacked another 25% over its Russian oil purchases, pushing total tariffs to 50%. India refused to fold and kept buying Russian crude anyway. In late January 2026, Trump removed the Russia-linked penalty, citing “India’s commitment to stop purchasing Russian Federation oil” – a commitment India’s own statements never actually confirmed. A February deal cut the remaining tariff to 18%. Then a Supreme Court ruling struck down the entire legal basis for the tariff regime, eventually settling India at just 10% by July, lower than China’s or Vietnam’s. Never a flat no, never full compliance, and let time and ambiguity do the rest. The same method just ran on Iran and the UAE at the negotiating table.
Handling Two Rivalries — And a Third
Delhi ran this balancing act on two fault lines at once: Iran versus the UAE over West Asia, and Russia versus the US over Ukraine and energy where India’s answer has simply been refusing to choose, buying discounted Russian oil while negotiating with Washington, and hosting Putin days after cutting a tariff deal with Trump.
Sitting alongside both, more fragile still, is China. Xi’s presence marked his first visit to India in seven years and the first Modi-Xi meeting on Indian soil since the 2020 Galwan clash. The tone was warm, Xi called it the latest of their “frequent interactions” over twelve years, but no border breakthrough came, or was expected. The relationship is propped up by trade neither side can walk away from: China was India’s single largest import source in 2025-26, at roughly $132 billion. Three rivalries, three techniques, one country refereeing all of them in the same 48 hours.
The Global South Pitch
Modi used his own address for a bigger pitch: the Global South, he said, is “in the front row facing global crises, but in the back row when it comes to decision-making.” He called for turning a “pyramid of privilege” into a “platform of partnership,” pushed for UN Security Council reform on an actual timeline, demanded rebalanced voting power at the IMF and World Bank, and proposed ten reform ideas be folded into a “BRICS Reform Roadmap” by next year. The declaration itself carried an unnamed but pointed line of “concern over unilateral trade measures” – a clear reference to the very US tariffs Washington had just eased.
How Washington Is Likely Reading This
None of it is a frontal challenge to American power, by design. No timeline binds Washington, no UNSC veto is under threat, and “concern over unilateral trade measures” names no country. The US likely reads the outcome as a net positive: India again kept BRICS from hardening into an anti-American bloc. The more uncomfortable signal isn’t in any sentence – it’s that eleven countries, including two that had just been on opposite sides of a shooting war, could still produce a joint document, hosted by a country deepening ties with the US and Israel at the same time. That’s convening power and legitimacy-building playing out over years, not headlines.
The Quiet Money Story
Alongside the diplomacy, India has spent the year building a financial toolkit never called “de-dollarization” but functionally aimed at reducing dependence on dollar clearing. Rupee-settlement accounts now run across roughly 34 countries; formal local-currency trade agreements are in place with the UAE, Indonesia, Mauritius, and the Maldives; UPI runs in eight countries; the RBI has repatriated gold, taking holdings to about 880 tonnes, roughly 14% of reserves, part of a BRICS-wide gold rush that has taken the bloc’s share of global gold reserves from 11% to over 17% since 2019. Notably, India stays out of mBridge, the working China-anchored cross-border digital-currency platform — unwilling to plug into a Beijing-led rail even while normalizing ties with Xi elsewhere. None of it means India is leaving the dollar system. It reads as an insurance policy, built quietly on purpose.
What Happens Next
A summit is a snapshot, not a settlement, and the real tests are still ahead.
Does the Declaration’s carefully balanced language survive if the Hormuz crisis flares again, as it already has twice this year? Can Modi answer his critics at home, including an opposition demanding he explain a “perceived endorsement” of the strikes on Iran through silence, with anything more than photographs and warm words the next time China comes up, especially given Beijing has already settled its land border with ten of the twelve countries it borders, leaving India and Bhutan as the lingering outliers? Will the rupee-and-gold strategy still look like prudent hedging if Washington ever decides to treat it as active de-dollarization? And as BRICS keeps expanding into a bloc of eleven members with wildly different interests, how many more Iran-versus-UAE moments can back-channel diplomacy paper over before consensus itself starts to break down?
Nobody in New Delhi, Washington, Beijing, or Tehran has an answer yet. What’s clear after this weekend is only that India has bought itself another year to keep proving the theory, that a country can sit at every table at once, and still be the one holding the pen.
AK works for Global MNC having 25+years of exp in BFSI Risk&Fraud Analytics in Cybersecurity. Founder @dharmic_indians and Governing committee member of @AalayamKaappom
Subscribe to our channels on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and YouTube to get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.
