India sets 12–13 September for the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam

India will host the 18th BRICS summit on 12 and 13 September at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal confirmed the dates at Friday’s briefing and said partner countries and outreach guests have been invited as well as the 11 members. The members on the current list are Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Some official notes still vary on whether Saudi Arabia sits as a full member or a special case. The summit photograph will settle that in public.

India took the chair on 1 January 2026 from Brazil and will hand it to China at the end of the year. This is India’s fourth turn, after 2012, 2016 and 2021. The year also marks two decades since the first BRIC meeting of foreign ministers in 2006. The official theme is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” The government has wrapped that phrase around Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Humanity First” line. Foreign ministers already met in Delhi on 14 and 15 May. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar used that session to name supply chains, market diversification and climate-resilient infrastructure as Indian priorities.

The chair year has been a travelling secretariat. The MEA says more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements have been held in over 25 Indian cities across the three standing pillars: political and security cooperation, economic and financial cooperation, and cultural and people-to-people work. One product already on paper is the Guwahati Declaration on coordinated action against illicit drug trafficking. Sherpa talks on the leaders’ joint statement are still open. That is normal this close to a summit. It is also where arguments over Ukraine, Gaza, the Iran war and the language of “multipolarity” usually stall.

Attendance is the first test. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected. Iran’s presence as a member, six months into a war with the United States and Israel, will force a sentence in the communiqué that either names the Strait of Hormuz or ducks it. Indonesia is at its first leaders’ summit as a member. Egypt, Ethiopia and the UAE are still new enough that their officials treat the week as a chance to write themselves into working groups that the original five built for themselves.

Outreach guests named in public so far include Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, in his capacity as BIMSTEC chair, and Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye as chairperson of the African Union. Other names will leak as the protocol list hardens. Partner-country status, created when the group expanded, is the buffer India is using to fill the hall without reopening the membership fight before September.

What the two days can actually decide is narrower than the theme. Leaders can endorse work already done by ministers on the New Development Bank, local-currency settlement and a few standards files. They cannot, in a weekend, build a payments system that replaces the dollar or write a security doctrine that binds China, India and Iran at once. The useful test for readers is whether the joint statement names Hormuz, names Ukraine, and names a date for the next bank or payments step. If it does none of those things, the summit will still have done the job India set for a chair year: keep the expanded club meeting in a hall that India built, on a date India chose, under a slogan India wrote.