India's brics leadership cracks under the weight of iran's war
New Delhi is running out of road. Nearly a month after U.S. and Israeli airstrikes decapitated Iran's leadership and effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the BRICS bloc — which India chairs — has managed to say precisely nothing. Two draft statements have been killed in committee. The group that positions itself as the geopolitical counterweight to the Western order cannot agree on whether a war involving three of its own members deserves a response.
A bloc at war with itself
The architecture of the problem is almost elegant in its dysfunction. Iran joined BRICS in 2024. So did the UAE. Saudi Arabia is still weighing an invitation to join. When Iranian rockets struck Emirati and Saudi targets in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli campaign, BRICS suddenly found itself hosting both the attacker and the attacked under the same institutional roof. One of the rejected draft statements explicitly condemned Israel and the United States. The UAE and Saudi Arabia were never going to sign that. China and Russia were never going to drop it. India, sitting at the head of the table, watched both drafts collapse.
What makes this particularly uncomfortable for New Delhi is the memory of July 2025, when BRICS did manage to condemn attacks on Iran and called for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. That statement now reads like a historical artifact. The bloc's silence today — on a conflict orders of magnitude more severe — is not just inconsistency. It is the kind of institutional paralysis that erodes credibility faster than any hostile press release from Washington ever could.
Modi's impossible geometry
Narendra Modi was in Tel Aviv days before the strikes began. That fact alone tells you something about where India's instincts lie. But instincts are a luxury New Delhi cannot fully afford right now. Nearly 10 million Indian nationals work in Gulf states — the UAE chief among them. The Strait of Hormuz, practically sealed since the conflict ignited, is the artery through which a substantial share of India's oil and gas flows. India has quietly negotiated safe passage for some of its tankers, a diplomatic feat that required not antagonizing anyone too loudly.
Iranian President Pezeshkian has since told Modi directly that BRICS should play an independent role in stopping the aggression. The ask is public now. And the pressure it creates is real: if India responds to Tehran, it risks its relationships with Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Washington, and Jerusalem simultaneously. If it stays silent, it confirms what critics have long argued — that India's BRICS leadership is performative, a seat at a table where the food never actually arrives.
The silence that compounds
This is not the first time BRICS has gone quiet when the moment demanded noise. When the United States seized Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the bloc offered nothing. Some members privately acknowledged the pattern then. Now, with a full-scale regional war reshaping energy markets and killing people, the silence has graduated from awkward to damaging.
There is a structural argument, of course. BRICS was never designed as a geopolitical decision-making body. It is a forum, a conversation space for emerging economies with overlapping frustrations about the Western-led financial order. Expecting it to function like a security council is, by that logic, a category error. But that argument is getting harder to sell to the bloc's own members, who are watching their institution become a footnote in a war it cannot bring itself to address.
The deeper issue is that BRICS expanded too fast and tested its cohesion too little. Adding Iran, the UAE, and a Saudi Arabia in the waiting room to a bloc that already contained Russia and China was always going to create fault lines. No one expected those fault lines to be stress-tested this quickly, or this brutally. India now holds the chairmanship of a group whose internal contradictions have been fully exposed — and the world is watching to see whether Modi has the diplomatic architecture to hold it together, or whether the whole construction quietly begins to come apart.