India will host the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam on 12 and 13 September

India will hold the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. The Ministry of External Affairs confirmed the dates and venue on Thursday. Leaders of member states and partner countries are invited, along with outreach guests. Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has been asked to the outreach session as BIMSTEC chair.

India took the chair on 1 January 2026, after Brazil, and will hand it to China at the end of the year. This is New Delhi's fourth turn, after 2012, 2016 and 2021. The grouping is 20 years old in 2026. The official theme is "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." The ministry ties that phrase to a people-first line that the prime minister's office uses across other forums.

Under the chairship the government says it has already run more than 350 meetings and high-level sessions in over 25 Indian cities. Those meetings sit on the three standing pillars: political and security, economic and financial, and cultural and people-to-people work. Foreign ministers met in Delhi on 14 and 15 May. Members adopted a Guwahati Declaration on illicit drug traffic. S. Jaishankar told that ministerial that supply chains, market diversification and climate-resilient infrastructure were India's priorities.

The membership list for 2026 is larger than the original five. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have been joined by Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and, in the documents India circulates, Saudi Arabia, whose formal accession Riyadh has never fully confirmed in public. That expansion is the political fact the summit has to manage. A table that holds Xi, Putin, the Iranian leadership and a Gulf monarchy is not the same body that met in Yekaterinburg in 2009.

Xi Jinping's expected presence is the bilateral event inside the multilateral one. He has not come to India for seven years. The Special Representatives' border talks in Beijing on 25 August were scheduled to put some agreed language on the Line of Actual Control before that arrival. Vladimir Putin is also expected. He will have seen Modi days earlier in Bishkek at the SCO summit.

Bharat Mandapam, opened in 2023 on the Pragati Maidan site for the G20, can seat 7,000 in one hall. It is the same complex that handled that earlier summit. Logistics are not the hard part. The hard part is a communiqué that 11 members can sign while a war continues around Iran, while Western sanctions still bind Russia, and while India tries to keep trade talks with the United States from collapsing.

The logo for the Indian chairship uses petals in the colours of the member flags and a namaste at the centre. That is design. The substance will be whatever survives the two days on minerals, payments systems, and the security language around terrorism. China takes the chair in January. Anything India wants written down has to be written in September.