The BRICS summit in New Delhi last weekend and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, which Prime Minister Modi attended a fortnight earlier, suggest a ‘non-Western’ push to the evolving new global order. Both BRICS and SCO—where Russia, India and China now sit at the core—were born during the US’s unipolar moment and, despite several internal tensions, have been evolving rapidly to keep up as the world searches for a new multipolarity.
Two clubs, one origin
BRICS did not begin as a geopolitical project. In 2001, Goldman Sachs coined ‘BRIC’ to flag Brazil, Russia, India and China as the coming engines of global growth, a forecasting device for asset allocators rather than statesmen, an economic idea before it was ever a political one. What began as an acronym grew in 2009 into a standing summit of emerging economies. Its recent enlargement, and the tier of partner and outreach countries created in 2024, confirm that the club now delivers value to members and aspirants alike.
The SCO took the opposite route, starting as a geopolitical story. It began in 1996 as the Shanghai Five, a mechanism through which China, Russia and three Central Asian States settled and demilitarised contested Soviet-successor frontiers. Its founding purpose was narrowly defensive—to keep China’s western borders quiet. India and Pakistan joined as full members in 2017, as the organisation reinvented itself into a geoeconomic forum for Eurasia, even as China’s grip on its trajectory and secretariat remained firm.
What connects the two is timing as much as membership. Both were conceived during the American unipolar moment—one as an economic idea, the other as a border settlement—and both have since drifted towards becoming broad-spectrum geoeconomic clubs that double as geopolitical ones. Russia, India and China sit at the core of both—an overlap that traces back to Yevgeny Primakov’s RIC triangulation of the late 1990s—and all three also sit inside the G20, the one forum where the East and the West still transact through economics rather than through blocs.
BRICS also began as a counterpoint to the G7, and the contrast is instructive. The G7 was born in 1975, a response to the oil shocks and the collapse of Bretton Woods, an emergency huddle of Western industrial democracies managing a crisis of their own making. BRICS emerged from the opposite direction entirely, a projection of where growth was headed outside the West, assembled by economies that had no seat at the G7 table to begin with.
The G7’s own unipolar-era instincts are revealing. In 2014, following Russia’s move on Crimea, the group suspended Moscow from what had briefly been the G8, reverting to seven. Yet the same unipolar West could not simply legislate emerging economies out of relevance. The 2008 financial crisis forced the G20 into existence at leaders’ level, an acknowledgment, however reluctant, that a club of seven could no longer manage the world economy alone. The G7 expelled Russia and elevated the G20 within the same decade, a fair summary of how the unipolar order has had to bend without quite breaking.
Testing a global hegemon
History explains how these clubs were built. What explains their staying power is leverage. Most BRICS and SCO members claim membership of another, more amorphous, group: the Global South. Collectively, BRICS has grown willing to contest American primacy on specific terrain: tariffs, sanctions, technology standards and now AI governance. Washington’s recent recourse to unilateral tariffs and sanctions has accelerated this pushback rather than deterred it.
The New Delhi Declaration criticised unlawful and coercive unilateral measures that bypass the UN Security Council, without needing to name the United States for the meaning to be clear. China uses that shared discomfort to challenge American primacy in trade and technology. Russia uses BRICS to demonstrate it remains far from isolated. Everyone else uses the platform to hedge.
This is where India’s position becomes genuinely distinctive rather than merely convenient. India sits at the intersection of East, West and South in a way no other BRICS or SCO member does, and it speaks with some authority on behalf of the Global South even as it deepens ties with a fragmenting West.
India has consistently steered BRICS away from becoming an anti-Western bloc and towards serving as a platform for the Global South’s own agenda—on Security Council reform, on development financing, on digital public infrastructure. This is nimble multi-alignment, or multi-vector engagement, operating at institutional scale.
India has also been a repeat guest at G7 summits, invited by successive hosts precisely because a G7 conversation without the world’s most populous democracy in the room feels increasingly incomplete. That has fed a recurring proposal in strategic circles for a ‘Democratic 10’, the G7 plus India, Australia and South Korea, a grouping organised around democratic governance rather than only industrial-era membership. Whether or not the D10 ever formalises, the fact that it is discussed at all confirms India’s unusual standing as a country with genuine footing in multiple camps rather than a fixed allegiance to one.
What the summits delivered
Beyond the theatre, New Delhi and Bishkek together produced something concrete. A unanimous BRICS declaration survived real faultlines among members. A push on payment interoperability was built around India’s own UPI rails rather than a symbolic common currency that was always discussed more than designed. And in Bishkek, the SCO reaffirmed the connectivity and counter-terrorism cooperation that keeps Eurasia’s middle powers talking to each other even when their capitals disagree on almost everything else.
Institutions built for narrow purposes—a growth forecast in one case, a border settlement in the other—are now doing the geoeconomic work of constructing blocks for a multipolar economic order. Neither BRICS nor the SCO can yet replace the design the West assembled after 1945, an architecture that has defined the world for eight decades. The G7’s own evolution, expelling Russia even as it made room for the G20, shows that the older order can adapt without disappearing.
But this year’s BRICS and SCO Summits confirm that non-Western powers are writing their own competing scripts now. India can help bring the East, West and South to the same page.
Ajay Bisaria | Former High Commissioner to Pakistan and Canada
(Views are personal)