Examine India's strategy of engaging simultaneously with Russia and China through BRICS while maintaining strategic ties with the West.

India's hosting of the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam (September 12–13, 2026), under its chairship theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" [2], illustrates a calibrated multi-alignment: engaging Moscow and Beijing on economic and Global South issues without diluting its Western partnerships.

Drivers of the strategy

• Strategic autonomy: India seeks issue-based coalitions rather than bloc membership, retaining freedom of choice on conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia.
• Material dependence: as the world's third-largest crude consumer with rising import-led demand [6], discounted Russian energy and legacy defence platforms remain irreplaceable in the short run — reinforced by the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit [4].
• Global South leadership: an expanded eleven-member BRICS, representing a large share of world population and GDP [2], amplifies India's demand for reform of global financial and security governance.

BRICS as the working instrument

• India's 2026 chairship ran a dense functional calendar — Sherpa meetings [1], the 11th Energy Ministers' Meeting at Gurugram [3], and MSME cooperation [2] — steering the bloc toward development and supply-chain resilience rather than anti-Western signalling.
• With China, BRICS supplies low-cost diplomatic space; past leaders' meetings on summit margins [5] have been used to stabilise ties after the Galwan disruption.

Constraints and Western balancing

• Russia-China convergence risks agenda capture, with de-dollarisation proposals India has consciously avoided endorsing.
• Expansion broadens legitimacy but weakens consensus among members with divergent interests.
• Simultaneously, India deepens Quad, technology and trade engagement with the West, exposing it to tariff and secondary-sanctions pressure.
• The trust deficit on the boundary question caps any Sino-Indian normalisation.

Thus India's approach is not fence-sitting but hedging across two overlapping orders, extracting energy security from one and technology and capital from the other. Its durability rests on keeping BRICS developmental rather than confrontational, and on reducing dependencies through diversified energy sourcing and defence indigenisation — a pragmatic extension of strategic autonomy suited to a multipolar world.