BRICS Summit: Focus on India-Brazil strategic partnership for a multipolar world

New Indian Express

5 hours ago

With the arrival of Prime Minister Modi in Rio de Janeiro to take part in the 2025 BRICS Summit & Brasilia for a bilateral State visit, a first by an Indian PM in nearly six decades, the gaze is now on the India-Brazil Strategic Partnership.
Far too long viewed essentially as South-South solidarity or symbolic multilateralism, this axis of rising power has in recent years achieved bolder geopolitical recognition. While India enhances its international footprint and Brazil restores its regional leadership, the convergences between the two democracies are no longer rhetorical; they increasingly become strategic driven by the shared vision of an equitable multipolar world order. In the midst of an expanded BRICS and rising challenges to the international system, Brazil has proved an invaluable interlocutor of India in the BRICS and the UN and in voicing the hopes and ambitions of the Global South.
Brazil today matters to India not only as the largest economy of Latin America but also as a like-minded democratic country with whom India wishes to 'co-write' the rules of international governance. This convergence has been reflected also in the growing frequency and intensity of high-level interaction between the two countries. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Prime Minister Modi have also been spotted several times since Lula's 2023 re-election as the two leaders have committed to upgrading the Strategic Partnership to the next level.
But the current era of geopolitics gives special meaning to their convergence. The Rio BRICS Summit, its first since the grouping expanded in 2024, occurs against the backdrop of a fracturing international order where the return of multilateralism is increasingly questioned. Western institutions increasingly appear self-absorbed and the global South is speaking out more vocally than before. In this fluid world, India and Brazil offer the world a development-focused and democratic alternative. Their collaboration in BRICS seeks to turn the grouping into more than the symbol of rising power solidarity that it is today. India and Brazil aim to make it the forum for offering tangible deliverables for the Global South in the form of alternate sources of finance like the New Development Bank or new models of trade, digital connectivity, and climate finance.
Indeed, the current Brazilian presidency of BRICS this year and the upcoming Indian chairmanship in 2026 is a rare diplomatic relay. Under Lula's administration, Brazil has emphasized a more politically integrated BRICS, one advocating for democratic values and challenging the imbalances of the current world order. Modi has echoed this priority, arguing that BRICS must induce international institutional change. The two leaders ratify the idea that the Global South should no longer only be the target of international decision, but the co-author of international rules.
This convergence is not limited to BRICS. The two countries are equally committed to restructuring the UN Security Council and are the most vocal members of the G4 grouping (India, Brazil, Germany, Japan) pushing for permanent representation for emergent powers. Both find the present configuration of the UNSC as archaic and unrepresentative. In their latest bilateral, Modi and Lula renewed their backing for each other's candidacies and called for time-bound negotiations in the UN. Brazil has used its presidency of the G20 in 2024 to showcase global governance reform and India has been forthright in its support of this agenda. Together, they have been able to give new impulse to what has thus been an extremely stalled process of reform.
Another area of great geopolitical convergence is in their approach towards the Global South. India and Brazil have been voices of Southern solidarity, with one difference: they offer pragmatic implementable solutions. India's 2023 and Brazil's 2024 G20 presidencies were built around development agendas, of inclusive finance and food security to digital public goods and climate justice. Lula openly acknowledged the reality of the fact several of Brazil's G20 agendas borrowed from India's G20 Presidency. Modi himself has praised Brazil for continuing the momentum and ensuring continuity in the upholding of voices of the developed world. As the baton comes up to South Africa to preside over the G20 presidency next year, the IBSA trio (India-Brazil-South Africa) would have achieved the rare distinction of back-to-back leadership of the world's most powerful economic forum and offer a unique moment of Southern convergence.
The bilateral is also expanding with new content. Commerce between India and Brazil has exceeded $12 billion, and complementarities in energy, agro-products, and pharma are driving the push. Indian companies like UPL, Wipro, and Tata Motors have increasingly expanded operations in Brazil, and Brazilian enterprises in mining and airlines are considering Indian marketplaces. Modi's visit is expected to deliver new deals in green energy, food processing, and defence cooperation. These steps are the bigger picture: India no longer regards Latin America as the faraway theatre of power politics and Brazil increasingly regards India as the gateway to the Indo-Pacific and the hub of the economic rise of Asia.
In the coming years, India and Brazil could really transcend being co-passengers of the multilateral system and turn out to be co-designers of a new equilibrium of power internationally. As bridge-builders between the Global South and the North, between the world of the democracies and the world of the developing nations, between development and growth, their bilateral ties are now a global good. For India, Brazil is as big of a partner of BRICS as it is a center-piece of a larger diplomatic offensive aimed at democratizing international institutions and transferring normative power.
When PM Modi and President Lula get together side by side at the Rio Summit, the conversation must be bold: the India-Brazil relationship is no longer peripheral but at the very core of the way the two countries see the future of world order. The strength of the relationship will be less in terms of common desire and more in terms of collaborative action, from G4 to BRICS, from the UN to the G20. In a world as desperately in need of new coalitions for reform as for peace and inclusive growth, the coming together of Delhi and Brasilia gives the world a strong, democratic, and developmental vision of the multipolar world to come.
(Manish Dabhade is an Associate Professor of Diplomacy in the School of International Studies, JNU& founded The Indian Futures, an independent think tank in New Delhi; X: @imanishdabhade)