When eleven leaders representing roughly half of humanity sit down in New Delhi and walk away with a single, unanimous text, the rest of us — even those of us who live far from any BRICS capital, in the folds of the Himalaya — should pay attention. On 12 September, the 18th BRICS Summit closed with the leaders adopting the New Delhi Declaration by consensus: a sprawling, 140-point document covering everything from United Nations reform to artificial intelligence to how nations pay one another for rice, oil and steel. For a small, landlocked country like ours, watching the architecture of the global economy shift from a quiet corner of South Asia, the significance of that unanimity is worth pausing on.
Consensus was not guaranteed
It is easy to underestimate how difficult that single word — “unanimous” — actually was to achieve this year. Only months earlier, in May, BRICS foreign ministers meeting in the same city failed to agree on a joint statement at all, split by the war in West Asia and by members sitting on opposite sides of it. That a bloc containing Iran and the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Brazil, China and India — countries with genuinely divergent interests and, in some cases, open rivalries — could nonetheless produce one shared text by September is itself the story. It suggests that even amid a fractured world of tariffs, sanctions and shooting wars, there remains an appetite among the largest developing economies to find common language rather than retreat into blocs of one.
For smaller states, this matters more than it might first appear. Multilateralism has always been the natural home of the weak against the strong; it is in forums, not in bilateral arm-wrestling, that a country like Bhutan has any real voice at all. Every time a large, diverse grouping proves it can still reach consensus, it renews a little of the credibility of the idea that global rules should be made together rather than imposed.
What the declaration actually offers the Global South
Strip away the diplomatic language, and the New Delhi Declaration speaks directly to concerns familiar to almost every developing country. It calls for reform of the UN Security Council and the IMF’s quota system so that voting power better reflects today’s economic weight rather than the arrangements of 1945 — explicitly insisting that any change should not come at the expense of developing countries, while protecting the shares of the poorest members. It pushes back against unilateral tariffs, secondary sanctions and carbon border measures that fall hardest on economies without the scale to absorb them. It calls for the restoration of a functioning WTO dispute settlement system, without which small trading nations have little recourse against much larger ones.
On payments, the bloc resisted the temptation of grand gesture. Rather than declaring a common BRICS currency — a headline that speculation had built up for months — the declaration settled on something more modest and more useful: continued work on interoperable, faster and cheaper cross-border payment systems, and greater use of local currencies where it makes sense. This is not a revolution against the dollar so much as an insurance policy against being at the mercy of any single currency’s politics. That is a lesson relevant well beyond BRICS membership. Any country whose trade or remittances move through systems it does not control has a stake in more resilient, more diverse plumbing for international payments.
On artificial intelligence, too, the declaration struck a note that Global South countries, ourselves included, should welcome: a commitment to inclusive access to AI resources and to giving developing nations an actual seat at the table of global AI governance, rather than leaving the rules to be written solely in Washington, Brussels or Beijing.
The lesson, not the membership
None of this requires taking sides in BRICS’ internal contradictions, which are real, or pretending the bloc speaks with one voice on every hard question — its language on West Asia, careful and country-unnamed, shows exactly how much compromise consensus demanded. But a small nation navigating between much larger neighbours does not need to join a grouping to learn from it. What New Delhi demonstrated is that a diverse, sometimes fractious set of countries can still choose the table over the trench when the alternative is fragmentation.
In a year when tariffs have been wielded as weapons and wars have disrupted the world’s oldest trade routes, that choice — however incomplete, however compromised — deserves to be recognised as good news. For the Global South broadly, and for those of us watching from its quieter margins, unanimity of this kind is not a small thing. It is evidence that the instinct to cooperate has not yet been crowded out by the instinct to divide, and that is a fact worth defending, wherever one sits on the map.
