This week, India will host the 18th BRICS summit. On 12–13 September, leaders from an enlarged grouping that now spans Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and newer members including Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates will gather at Bharat Mandapam under India’s chairmanship. The official theme — “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” — is more than diplomatic wallpaper. It is an attempt to turn a once-narrow club into a working platform for the Global South at a moment of wars, disrupted energy markets and contested multilateral institutions.
For Bhutan, the summit is not a distant spectacle. It is a neighbouring event whose outcomes will travel across the Himalayas.
India is Bhutan’s principal development partner, largest trading partner and the market that absorbs the electricity that still underwrites much of the national budget. Hydropower cooperation — from Chukha and Tala to Mangdechhu and the newly commissioned Punatsangchhu-II — is the backbone of that relationship. India’s BRICS agenda this year puts climate finance, green infrastructure, digital public goods and alternative payment systems at the centre. Those are precisely the domains in which Bhutan is trying to move from a hydropower-dependent model toward a more diversified green economy, including the Gelephu Mindfulness City and wider e-mobility and clean-energy plans.
A more practical BRICS matters here. If the grouping can convert rhetoric about local-currency trade and faster payment rails into usable mechanisms, small exporters and energy sellers in the region stand to gain. If sovereign and development capital discussed on the sidelines of the summit finds bankable green projects, Himalayan infrastructure and climate adaptation need not wait only on traditional bilateral lines of credit. Bhutan already works with India on RuPay and other digital linkages. An India that is steering BRICS toward shared digital public infrastructure is an India better placed to extend those tools without asking Thimphu to choose between blocs.
There is also a voice question. BRICS now claims a large share of the world’s population and a growing share of its economy. Small climate-vulnerable states rarely sit at that table. Bhutan’s arguments — carbon-negative status, glacier melt, the cost of adaptation in mountain economies — travel farther when they are carried by a partner that is setting the agenda rather than merely reacting to it. The outreach track, which includes BIMSTEC’s current chair, is another opening. Bhutan is a BIMSTEC member. Regional connectivity, energy grids and disaster cooperation discussed in Delhi will not stay in Delhi.
None of this means Bhutan should join BRICS or abandon its tradition of measured diplomacy. It means the kingdom should treat the summit as a policy event, not a news item. What India extracts on climate finance, energy transition, digital rails and a less polarised language of the Global South will shape the environment in which Bhutan negotiates its next five-year plan, its power-sale contracts and its room for manoeuvre between New Delhi and Beijing.
When the host of such an important event is the country through which Bhutan’s trade, power and much of its development finance still flow, the distance from Bharat Mandapam to Thimphu is shorter than the map suggests. A resilient South is not only a slogan for eleven capitals. For a Himalayan state, it is a practical interest.
