India’s strategic autonomy faces its biggest test at the BRICS summitAs New Delhi hosts the 18th BRICS summit on 12–13 September, India’s foreign policy posture deserves particularly close scrutiny. The gathering comes at a moment of exceptional geopolitical strain: the war in Ukraine remains unresolved, conflict in the Middle East has intensified, global trade is increasingly shaped by sanctions and strategic rivalry, and multilateral institutions are struggling to produce consensus. Against that backdrop, pressure on states outside traditional alliance structures to choose a side has become steadily harder to resist. India, however, has continued to do precisely that.
New Delhi’s answer has been the language of strategic autonomy — cooperation without permanent alignment, dialogue without automatic endorsement, and a willingness to maintain relationships with states that increasingly regard one another as adversaries. That approach has allowed India to deepen its partnership with the United States and other Western powers while preserving longstanding ties with Russia, maintaining channels with Iran and simultaneously expanding its relationship with Israel and Gulf Arab states.
The BRICS summit illustrates both the advantages and the contradictions inherent in that strategy. The gathering itself brings together countries whose geopolitical interests frequently diverge. Russia remains at war with Ukraine; Iran is at the centre of the current Middle Eastern crisis; China and India continue to manage a relationship marked by strategic rivalry and an unresolved border dispute. Yet all sit within the same expanding BRICS framework. The summit has already produced a New Delhi declaration calling for restraint, diplomacy and multilateral solutions to international disputes, reflecting India’s preference for language broad enough to preserve communication among governments with sharply different interests.
For New Delhi, this is not simply a philosophical commitment to non-alignment under another name. Strategic autonomy serves concrete national interests. India depends on access to Russian energy and defence cooperation while simultaneously requiring Western technology, investment and market access. It competes with China for influence across Asia but cannot afford permanent confrontation with its largest neighbour. It values its relationship with Israel while also maintaining important economic and political ties with Iran and the Arab world.
Such overlapping interests make rigid alignment unusually costly. By avoiding it, India has preserved a degree of diplomatic flexibility that few major powers currently possess.
That flexibility has practical value. India can communicate with Moscow without the political constraints faced by most Western capitals, while also maintaining relations with Kyiv. It can engage Tehran while retaining close ties with Israel and Washington. And despite years of tension with Beijing following the deadly 2020 border clashes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping have used the BRICS summit to continue a cautious effort to stabilise bilateral relations. Xi’s visit to India is his first since 2019, underscoring how multilateral forums can provide space for engagement even where strategic mistrust remains profound.
In diplomatic terms, access itself can become a form of influence. A country capable of speaking credibly to competing camps may not necessarily possess the power to resolve their disputes, but it retains opportunities that disappear once communication channels close. In an international system increasingly divided by sanctions, economic blocs and security partnerships, that ability is becoming comparatively scarce.
There are, however, limits to portraying India’s position as cost-free pragmatism. Strategic autonomy can easily be interpreted by partners as strategic ambiguity. New Delhi’s reluctance to explicitly condemn certain actions by Russia, its repeated preference for carefully calibrated language on international crises and its resistance to Western pressure have periodically frustrated governments that expect India, as a major democracy and increasingly important security partner, to adopt clearer positions.
The same ambiguity can also constrain India’s ability to present itself as a defender of a rules-based international order. Strategic autonomy is most convincing when it produces tangible diplomatic outcomes. If it becomes merely a mechanism for avoiding difficult choices, the distinction between principled independence and opportunistic equivocation becomes harder to sustain.
BRICS itself exposes another complication. The organisation has expanded well beyond its original membership and now contains countries with substantially different political systems, economic priorities and strategic ambitions. Some members view it primarily as a platform for greater representation of the Global South; others see it as a means of challenging Western economic and political dominance. India has generally resisted attempts to turn BRICS into an explicitly anti-Western coalition, preferring to use it as another pillar of a diversified foreign policy rather than as an alternative alliance system. Recent discussions in New Delhi have again highlighted both BRICS’ growing weight and the deep internal divisions that make unified geopolitical action difficult.
That balancing act may ultimately be one of India’s most important contributions to the bloc. New Delhi has an interest in stronger institutions representing emerging economies, reform of global governance and greater economic autonomy for developing states. But it also has little incentive to sacrifice its increasingly valuable partnerships with the United States, Europe and other Western economies in pursuit of a confrontational BRICS identity.
The result is a foreign policy that can sometimes appear frustratingly cautious but is highly attuned to India’s changing position in the international system. Unlike during the Cold War, strategic autonomy today is not primarily about remaining outside rival blocs. It is about participating simultaneously in multiple, sometimes competing networks while refusing to allow any single partnership to determine the entirety of Indian foreign policy.
That strategy will inevitably generate contradictions. India cannot indefinitely satisfy Moscow, Washington, Tehran, Jerusalem and Beijing whenever their interests collide. Nor does maintaining dialogue automatically translate into the ability to mediate major wars. Diplomatic access should therefore not be confused with diplomatic control.
But the alternative — reflexively attaching Indian policy to one geopolitical camp — would also impose substantial costs. At a time when alliances are hardening and international institutions are increasingly paralysed by rivalry, preserving relationships across competing centres of power gives New Delhi options that many countries no longer possess.
As BRICS leaders gather in New Delhi, the strongest argument for India’s approach is therefore not that strategic autonomy has solved the crises surrounding it. It plainly has not. Rather, it has preserved India’s capacity to manoeuvre within them.
That distinction matters. In a world increasingly demanding binary allegiances, foreign policy influence may depend not only on choosing the right partners, but on retaining the ability to speak to those whom one’s partners cannot. For India, patient, interest-driven diplomacy remains a gamble — but so far, the evidence suggests it has delivered something increasingly valuable: room to choose its own course.