BRICS may be dreaming of a new world order, but its latest summit showed just how difficult it is to agree on what that order should look like. On one hand, the 18th BRICS Summit forged consensus on cross-border terrorism, secured convergence among all 11 members on the crisis in West Asia, and facilitated an initial conversation between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The Summit’s New Delhi resolution also tentatively offers an alternative blueprint of global governance, seeking to reshape the international system in favour of greater representation for developing and emerging economies.On the other hand, even though the ambition is clear, the pathway to that goal is not. Part of this is the divergence of interests among its members, which has repeatedly limited the groupings ability to breathe life into its lofty aspirations (via tangible commitments). This is evident across multiple areas. For example, BRICS failed to reach a consensus on any candidate for the United Nations Secretary General’s post (the election is due in late October 2026). It also deflected the cross-border payments issue to a task force without a clear deadline. At a time when nations are becoming increasingly Darwinian on resources, BRICS also produced no new binding agreements on stockpiling, resource sharing or supply chain guarantees (which becomes especially crucial given the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which will adversely impact India).It dilutes expression of concern on US-Israel attacks on Iran (from the BRICS 2025 Rio de Janeiro Declaration). More fundamentally, the declaration does little to redress the structural imbalances within the grouping itself. While legitimately criticising Western sanctions and protectionism, the declaration failed to criticise China’s use of export controls, non-tariff barriers and market-access restrictions against BRICS nations and partners. Effectively, there is a massive gap between political declarations and enforceable mechanisms.The economic asymmetries within BRICSThe economic asymmetries within BRICS illustrate the problem. India’s India’s share of world goods exports was just 1.88% in 2025 (marginally up from 1.71% in 2011) compared to China’s 14.6% (up from 9% in 2011). The disparity is even greater in incomes. China’s share of the world income is 17.4% in 2025 (up from 10% in 2011) in contrast to India’s 3.5% (up from 2.5% in 2011). The combined share of the other BRICS actually declined from 11.9% to 11.5% in the same period. These are not mere statistical disparities. They reflect vastly different capabilities to influence the rules, institutions and economic structures that BRICS seeks to reform.Essentially, BRICS seeks greater autonomy from Western financial and technological systems but remains deeply dependent on Chinese manufacturing, capital, technology and supply chains. This circumscribes the strategic autonomies of all BRICS nations (given they are dependent on either the United States of America or China for basic capabilities) and constrains India’s emergence as an alternative global manufacturing hub.From India’s perspective, therefore, the document reveals an absence of strategic vision about what India wants from the emerging world order, and how it intends to advance its own strategic and economic interests within it. Essentially the 18th BRICS Summit exposes the uncomfortable truth that India has entered a period of systemic international upheaval without a grand strategy for navigating it. This belies the pervasive notion of India’s distinctive status in the world, and future role in the emerging world order (shared by both the silent majority and its politico-bureaucratic elite).The problem is not a lack of ambition among Indians. It is the absence of a political project capable of converting that ambition into sustained national effort. There continues to be a profound mismatch between the Union, the states, and local governments, and between the political class and the rest of society. Barring the post-independence period, the Indian State has consistently failed to unite the nation around national dreams, or mobilise the people to breathe life in those aspirations, and thereby work towards great-power status.India urgently needs a coherent long-term national strategyConsequently, greatness is not a relentless and existential pursuit for the nation-state (except as a nebulous and abstract notion). This is ultimately a failure of political imagination and organisation. The international system will not wait for India to realise her potential. Today, nation-states are competing relentlessly for markets, technology, capital, resources, strategic influence and institutional power. In this environment, national power cannot be forged through symbolic and performative declarations alone. India urgently needs a coherent long-term national strategy (not periodic hollow declarations of Viksit Bharat and Acche Din in 2047), complemented by the systematic and total mobilisation of India’s economy, institutions and society. Only then can we win this global Darwinian competition, and shape (not just adapt) the emerging world order.Also Read: Did the BRICS Advance their Founders’ Vision and Objectives in New Delhi?How India navigates the present global polycrisis will ultimately depend on three things: its strategic foresight, its vision for the nation, and its capacity to govern – and, crucially, its ability to fuse all three in pursuit of the national interest. That begins with a deceptively simple question: against whom, and against what standard, does India benchmark itself?The choice of benchmark determines the scale of ambition. Under prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, China was India’s principal benchmark for India’s strategic ambition. Consequently, India was meaningfully thinking and working on scaling up our manufacturing, infrastructure, technology, universities, military power, logistics, maritime capability, urbanisation, capital markets, energy, demographics and state capacity. However, over the 12 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s ideological orientation has increasingly recast India’s strategic position through the lens of Pakistan.Lowering the ceiling of India’s ambitionThe BJP’s (domestic and global) political rhetoric, media discourse, military procurement priorities, diplomatic attention etc. are excessively Pakistan-centric. By lowering the reference point against which we measure ourself, the BJP has lowered the ceiling of India’s ambition. This has has profound long-term strategic and tactical consequences.Firstly, the BJP government has fundamentally been unable to understand how the geo-economic and geo-political competition between the United States of America (USA) and China is reconfiguring the world order. Preparing for an eventual conflict, both nations are dramatically reorienting their economies and national security strategies, as well as carving of spheres of influence. This undoubtedly creates disruptions. But it also creates massive opportunities, which India should be ideally exploiting deftly.Just to cite one crucial example, the US is primarily a naval power which protects global trade – 80% of global trade by volume is sea-based, with 4 out of every 5 tonnes of goods traded internationally transported by ships. The West Asian conflict (combined with the licensing of the Hormuz Strait), China’s shipbuilding pace (China built 56% of the world’s new ship tonnage in 2025, and controlled about 14.4% of the world’s merchant shipping capacity, measured by deadweight tonnage), reluctance of the US to protect maritime trade routes or honour its security commitments, coupled with its willingness to violate international rules and resorting to primordial rules of statecraft have triggered a race to institutionalise post-US arrangements.The CRINK coalition and the Mecca Pact exemplify emerging alternative security arrangements, while the proliferation of Free-Trade Agreements reflects the emergence of alternative economic arrangements. India is uniquely poised to capitalise on these upheavals because it sits in the centre of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), arguably its greatest strategic advantage.However, geography gives India an option; only state capacity can turn that option into power. Given this, India must move aggressively to deepen political, economic and security ties with countries along the IOR rim, building a network of partnerships around its maritime neighbourhood. India should also become a major global shipbuilding power, and spearhead a National Shipbuilding Mission. This is particularly urgent because the Indian Ocean is the world’s fastest-warming ocean basin, making it a region of growing strategic, economic and ecological consequence.Secondly, India has some core domestic strengths and capabilities. Apart from our geographical advantages, we have a huge domestic market, boast of a growing economy, a massive labour force, sizeable diasporic networks, political relationships with both the Global North and Global South and proximity to energy, as well as proximity to maritime and manufacturing nodes.BJP’s conscious choice to focus on incessant propagandaBut is the BJP government adequately leveraging and marshalling those to position India well? While Chinese state-directed investments in infrastructure has boosted their economy – one estimate suggests that China’s infrastructure expansion contributed to roughly 9-20% of China’s average annual GDP growth between 2003 and 2016 – the BJP has consciously chosen to focus on incessant politicking and propaganda to bolster itself.For example, instead of actually focusing on growth, the BJP has either manipulated figures by resorting to statistical jugglery or just withheld data. The 2017-18 Periodic Labour Force Survey which highlighted unemployment was at a 45 year high, was also not released till after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Similarly, the 2017 NSSO Consumer Expenditure Survey was never released because it reportedly showed a significant decline in real per-capita consumption. The National Crime Record Bureau data on farmers’ suicides was also delayed.Similarly, the state of pervasive dysfunction is visible across the length and breath of India, primarily because of collapsing public infrastructure that is built hurriedly and poorly and rife with corruption. There are airports that don’t have a single flight. For example, across 143 airports handling domestic traffic, 29 recorded zero passenger traffic while 15 UDAN airports are currently non-operational. Train and bus stations are chaotic, crowded and unsafe. NCRB data suggests nearly 2.63 lakh Indians have died on railway tracks, in railway premises and railway crossings between 2014-2024).There is also widespread distrust amongst economic stakeholders with economic boycotts being engineered on the basis of religion and language. Tax-terrorism is being consciously used for coercive rent extraction from businesses. Due to the accommodation of inadequately qualified actors with political proximity to the BJP, scientific temper is getting eroded, along with the tradition of research and development.These factors have slashed India’s welfare and social justice paradigm, severely impacting Dalits, Adivasis, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the most vulnerable sections of society.The rampant fire sale of Public Sector Units and national resources to oligopolies – while China strengthens its State Owned Enterprises [SOEs] for both economic and foreign policy goals – have also added to the problem. It is of no coincidence that China’s SOEs boast of USD 35 trillion in assets, and USD 8.3 trillion in revenue.Inability to distribute material benefits equitablyAs a result, India, for the last decade has been unable to distribute material benefits equitably, build up our manufacturing base (manufacturing’s share of nominal GDP fell from about 16.0% in 2012-‘13 to 12.6% in 2025-‘26; with only 18.5 million Indians employed in manufacturing compared to 100 million in China), run functional cities (despite spending Rs 1.64 lakh crore for 100 SMART cities), meaningfully employ the 8 million youth who join the workforce every year in MSMEs or in Start-Ups or lift the base (which is why 80.4 crore Indians are dependent on government ration) or encourage private corporate investment for nation building.Even if the government resorts to fanciful propaganda to obfuscate the reality, millions of Indians have lost faith in the BJP government’s ability to meaningfully improve their lives. This goes even for capital expenditure (which has admittedly jumped up five-fold nominally from Rs 2.0 lakh crore in 2014-’15 to Rs 11.2 lakh crore in 2025-’26). However, numerous audit reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) have repeatedly highlighted cases of structural distress, premature failure, reconstruction and wasteful expenditure in the public infrastructure built after 2014.The quality of roads, bridges, train stations, airports etc. is so bad that ordinary Indians don’t have faith in that infrastructure’s ability to improve their lives or take pride in that infrastructure as representative of the nation’s progress. Given that the BJP government has failed to convert capital expenditure into durable productivity gains, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that India has lost a decade.BJP govt doesn’t have a macro-normative vision for IndiaPart of the problem is that the BJP government doesn’t have a macro-normative vision for India. Instead it has produced technocratic solutions and chimeras for structural problems, which even opposition states have unfortunately aped. Just to cite an example, India can scale up drastically by investing in public education to unleash innovation and skilled manpower (like PM Rajiv Gandhi did by unleashing the Telecom revolution).Instead of making our schools and colleges palaces, or deepening pedagogic freedoms, or ring fencing curriculum from political interference, or increasing the share of the educational pie to accommodate for more students, India is myopically choosing to import foreign private universities (whose commercial interests will ensure they primarily service the socio-cultural and economic elite). Most of our finest minds who are now lauded as the world’s foremost experts and leaders studied in public, not private universities. Just to cite a few examples, Dr Manmohan Singh, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Prof Amartya Sen, Sundar Pichai, Prof Raghuram Rajan etc. all studied in publicly funded institutions.Yet it’s become fashionable to dismiss public education as ineffective and expensive. This is an agenda the BJP has consciously pursued for the past 26 years ever since prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Council on Trade and Industry recommended privatising virtually the entire higher-education sector except the liberal arts). Similarly, even though the public sector has been the single biggest contributor to upward social and economic mobility for vast sections of society, it remains fashionable to privatise public assets and resources. This is despite the fact that a World Bank study showed that Indians working in the public-sector earned on average between 62-102% more than comparable formal-private-sector workers and 164-259% more than those in the informal sector.Thirdly, led by prime minister Modi, the BJP government envisaged its role like a concert-master coordinating and directing the actions of both the state and society. The problem is that the BJP is primarily an electoral (but not governance) machine whose DNA is to centralise power to further its politico-ideological goals. Any careful observer of India would invariably arrive at the bitter conclusion that all of the BJP’s impulses to effect a gleichshantung (a process by which political, social, cultural, educational, media, professional and economic institutions are brought under centralised party control, like under Nazi Germany) which they have done very effectively has been to impose one leader, one ideology, one party and one culture on the nation.This has contributed to a profound sense of precarity, distrust and fear in the nation. It’s no coincidence that approximately 41,300 High Net Worth Individuals have left India on a net basis between 2018 and 2025 alone. Despite PM Modi’s promises to deliver Amrit Kaal, the bitter reality is that the BJP’s default impulse is to effect a cultural revolution. The problem with BJP’s plans for a cultural revolution circumscribe the very intellectual and metaphysical traditions that enabled Indians to dominate academia, publishing, creative arts and technology globally. That is why the BJP will always be a bad idea for the national interest.Rebuilding IndiaLike Deng Xiaoping did as a corrective to the devastating Mao years, India will have an opportunity to redress the regressions of the Modi-Shah years post 2029. But for that we will need innovators, engineers, entrepreneurs and industrialists who will need to be mobilised for the noble cause of rebuilding India. We will need dreamers and disrupters, who can not just imagine the (currently) unimaginable but also achieve the impossible. The objective should be nothing less than a national effort to equip India for the emerging world order.China offers a revealing contrast. Beijing forced its technology sector to redirect capital and talent away from consumer platforms towards what the Communist Party of China (CPC) considers strategically vital (semiconductors, aviation and defence). China possesses a state capable of identifying strategic sectors and aligning capital, infrastructure, research institutions, SOEs and private companies around them. India needs comparable strategic coordination without Chinese coercion.Also Read: BRICS: The Summit India Wished Happened ElsewhereThe Indian State should see companies as partners in nation-building, and bring together capital, technology and capacity to actualise national priorities, and persuade them to invest accordingly. Done properly, this would not be a zero-sum exercise between national interest and private wealth. Strategic investment would create new industries, generate enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs, strengthen ancillary sectors (particularly MSMEs) and create mass employment. Of course, this requires India’s conglomerates (many of which continue to prosper because of state protectionism and favour) to assume a far greater burden of national economic transformation. Our shared goal should be to change the world, not just to enrich ourselves.We must therefore build company verticals that can transform societies. Only then can we forge an India capable of changing the world. To do what the BJP government is doing (which is either to smother businesses and their entrepreneurial spirit through state coercion, or by just handing over everything to crony capitalists who support its political interests) is counterproductive. There is a better way.Similarly, the Indian state is the biggest land owner (spanning ministries, Railways, Defence, public-sector enterprises and other state entities). Like China did under Deng, the state should build vast affordable housing for the urban middle and vulnerable classes. Interestingly, this is an experiment that the Indian National Congress government started in 1967 with the Delhi Development Authority (DDA)’s housing scheme, which has provided over a million Indians affordable housing (of which approximately two-thirds were purposefully directed toward economically vulnerable households.This was a clear example of housing as an instrument of social mobility through the public sector. If this can be replicated across India, it would mean both planned urbanisation and enhanced asset ownership (which means enhanced socio-economic mobility and productivity). Essentially, it will give millions of Indians a strong foundation to build a better life for their children.But to breathe life into our goals, we will also need engineers of the soul, who can reshape India’s mass consciousness. This does not mean dictating what Indians should belief. It means creating the political, cultural and social conditions under which constitutional patriotism, scientific temper, pluralism, excellence and national ambition can flourish. Actualising this means ensuring that the entire nation is deployed to reshape both India’s software (culture, values and attitudes) and hardware (economy, institutions and systems).This would mean creatively cultivating a constitutional consciousness through films/serials, books, news, social media, educational systems and religions. It would mean establishing connections with all progressive forces working creatively to further the idea of India at every level – from the panchayat to the parliament. And it would mean encouraging a commitment to the inevitable reality that all Indians are ultimately united in a great and common cause – of building the noble mansion of India, along constitutional lines.India knows much of this. But why hasn’t it been able to pursue and execute these objectives relentlessly? This also requires an urgent recalibration amongst the bureaucratic class and political organisations which suffer from structural pathologies. India’s political system rewards electoral optimisation, while great-power competition requires long-horizon optimisation.Need for political stakeholders who can think in 25–50-year horizonsUnfortunately today, politicos are socialised to master the mechanics of the greasy pole – outmanoeuvring internal competition, not ruffling the status quo, and placating entrenched interests. Prioritising process over purpose, and intra-party survival over transformative outcomes invariably produces leaders adept at navigating the corridors of power, but incapable of creatively imagining what power can do, and disruptively deploying it to achieve ends.This has consequently led to the triumph of mediocrity, with much of the political dynamism in the last decade outside the formal political space (the exceptions being the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the Samvidhan Conventions, both led by leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi, as well as the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act CAA-National Register of Citizens (NRC), farmers and Gen-Z protests).Unless we comprehensively reorient political and bureaucratic systems to become more disruptive, innovative and dynamic, we cannot actualise the great transformation of India (taking from Karl Polanyi). That requires institutions and political stakeholders capable of thinking in 25–50-year horizons.Ultimately, the 18th BRICS Summit is a test for India. It asks whether India can move from complaining about the international order (by merely joining alternative institutions) to acquiring the power to shape it. That necessitates a a grand strategy, which is more than a laundry list of policies or technocratic solutions. It is the deliberate alignment of a nation’s economic, technological, diplomatic, military, institutional and social capabilities around a long-term conception of national power.Our goal, no matter how ambition and unrealistic it may seem today, is to achieve what the United States of America achieved in two centuries and that China achieved in three decades. In striving to achieve the impossible, we must remind ourselves of what Thucydides once said – “the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it”.Pushparaj Deshpande is Samruddha Bharat Foundation’s Director & Editor of The Great Indian Manthan (Penguin).