Discuss the challenges India faces in building consensus within an expanded BRICS grouping. How does this compare with its experience of hosting the G-20 in 2023?

BRICS today is an eleven-member bloc with a ten-nation "partner country" tier created at Kazan (2024) [2], accounting for a large share of world population and output. India's fourth Chairship, culminating in the 18th Summit at Bharat Mandapam under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" [1], therefore tests consensus-building in a far more heterogeneous grouping than the five-nation summits it hosted in 2012, 2016 and 2021.

Challenges of consensus in an expanded BRICS

• Heterogeneity: expansion from five to eleven members — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE (2024) and Indonesia (2025) [2] — has widened the spread of political systems and economic interests, diluting the original emerging-economy identity.
• Active conflicts among members: with West Asian members on opposing sides of the Iran–Israel–US confrontation, a single agreed narrative on regional security is hard to draft.
• India's balancing act: simultaneous commitments to the Quad and to a bloc containing China and Russia constrain how far India can endorse explicitly non-Western positions.
• Economic optics: growing intra-BRICS local-currency payment arrangements invite charges of "de-dollarisation" and threats of retaliatory tariffs, raising the cost of consensus for India.
• Institutional thinness: BRICS has no charter or permanent secretariat; the chair must build agreement meeting by meeting — Energy (Gurugram), Health and Youth tracks in 2026 [3].

Comparison with the G-20, 2023

• In 2023 India secured a consensus New Delhi Leaders' Declaration despite deep divisions over Ukraine, and admitted the African Union as a permanent member [4] — the division then lay largely between members over an external conflict.
• The G-20 offered an established sherpa-and-working-group machinery; BRICS expects the chair to supply that scaffolding itself.
• The shared thread is India's Global South bridge-building role, now applied to a bloc whose fault lines run between members themselves.

India's G-20 experience shows that patient, text-level diplomacy can convert divergence into agreement. Applying the same incrementalism — emphasising development, health, energy access and technology over contested security language — can yield a workable BRICS outcome. Steered thus, the Presidency advances India's claim to be a credible voice of the Global South and a builder of reformed multilateralism.