India’s Global south wager at BRICS

India used the final day of the BRICS summit for outreach to regional powers across the Global South. Can Delhi now turn diplomatic goodwill into tangible outcomes?

A day after leaders adopted the New Delhi Declaration, Modi used the summit’s final day, alongside the open session for BRICS members and partners, to work through seven bilateral meetings — with leaders and delegations from South Africa, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Egypt, the Philippines and more.

This was not summit choreography. It was India using its year as BRICS chair to conduct retail diplomacy with the Global South at a scale few hosts have attempted. The guest list was not random. Cyril Ramaphosa’s South Africa is BRICS’ founding African anchor and the continent’s most industrialised economy. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and a BRICS partner country since last year, arrived pitching itself - through Vice-President Kashim Shettima, standing in for an absent President Tinubu - as an investor gateway to the African Continental Free Trade Area. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s Kazakhstan brought Central Asian connectivity and critical minerals to the table. Egypt, sitting astride the Suez chokepoint, and the Philippines, extending India’s outreach to the edge of the South China Sea, rounded out a map that stretched from West Africa to the Western Pacific. Read together, the day’s meetings resembled less a scattering of handshakes than a curated survey of the Global South’s regional anchors.

The case for calling this a genuine shift rests on follow-through, not friendliness. India spent its G20 year winning permanent membership for the African Union at that table, and has since convened two Voice of the Global South summits. What Delhi is now attempting is to convert that credibility into something transactional — trade corridors, development financing and digital public infrastructure exports - rather than let it remain mere goodwill. That distinguishes the pitch from both Western conditionality and Beijing’s debt-heavy infrastructure diplomacy: India is selling itself as a convener without a chequebook large enough to buy loyalty, which is either its biggest limitation or its most credible asset, depending on who is asking.

History counsels caution. The Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 also began as solidarity projects and ended up long on communiqués and short on institutions, because the moment specifics arrived, members’ interests diverged sharply.

Seven bilaterals in a single day are choreography unless they leave behind monitorable deliverables — financing lines with timelines, not MoUs for the filing cabinet. India’s own aid budgets and diplomatic bandwidth remain modest next to its ambitions, and Beijing’s chequebook is not going anywhere. Whether September 13 is remembered as more than a crowded diary page depends entirely on what Delhi does once the leaders fly home — whether Nigeria’s investment pitch gets an Indian follow-up call by November, whether Kazakhstan’s connectivity ask survives the next crisis elsewhere on the calendar. India’s chairship of BRICS ends with this summit; the harder test — turning a strong day of photographs into a working platform — begins now, and it is not a test India can pass alone.