When India assumed the BRICS presidency in 2023, there was genuine excitement in New Delhi about what the organization could become. Five countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—representing 3 billion people, enormous resource wealth, and diverse economic models. Not a Western alliance, not explicitly anti-Western, but post-Western. A multipolar alternative.

By the end of the presidency, BRICS had expanded. Six new members were invited to join. And India's role shifted from visionary architect to careful, somewhat frustrated balancer.

BRICS was never a natural alliance. Brazil and Russia have minimal trade. India and China are geopolitical competitors with a disputed border. South Africa's economy is smaller than most of India's states. The binding logic was negative: what unites BRICS is not what it wants to build together but what it wants to resist—Western dominance of global financial architecture, the dollar's unchallenged role, the Washington Consensus on development.

India's vision for BRICS expansion was strategic. Bringing in Argentina, Iran, Egypt, Thailand—countries aligned with Indian interests or shared developmental challenges—could shift voting patterns, reduce Chinese dominance, and create a coalition genuinely representing the Global South. For a moment, it seemed possible.

But expansion without clear structure created problems. BRICS lacked common foreign policy. Russia-Ukraine immediately exposed fissures: India wanted neutrality, China had its own interests, South Africa was conflicted. Adding six more members multiplied the disagreements. An expanded BRICS became harder to coordinate, more prone to blockage.

The fundamental challenge is that BRICS lacks what makes any multilateral institution function: shared interests beyond the negative. NATO has a unified security threat. The EU has integrated economics and legal frameworks. BRICS has... what? A shared desire to reduce Western leverage. That's not enough to build institutions on.

What India wanted from BRICS was an alternative development financing model. The New Development Bank, created in 2014, was supposed to rival the IMF and World Bank. It's still tiny—managing billions while the World Bank manages hundreds. Why? Because India, Brazil, and South Africa aren't willing to put in the capital needed. Without serious financial backing, it remains a symbolic gesture.

This is the paradox of BRICS: the countries want alternatives to Western institutions but aren't willing to finance the alternatives adequately. It's easier to protest the unfairness of global architecture than to build something better.

China, notably, has taken a different approach. It built the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and launched Belt and Road—real capital, real projects, real leverage. Russia built alternatives to SWIFT (though imperfectly). India talks about creating alternatives while remaining deeply integrated into Western-dominated systems.

For India specifically, BRICS expansion reveals a strategic ambiguity. India wants a multipolar world, but it's not willing to fully defect from Western institutions where it has negotiated real interests. India values BRICS as a counterweight to China but doesn't want BRICS to become so powerful that it constrains Indian independence. India welcomes expansion to dilute Chinese dominance but resists expansion that brings in countries that might oppose Indian interests (Pakistan, for instance, will never join as long as India has veto power).

The practical outcome is that BRICS has become useful but limited. Useful for coordination on Global South issues, for presenting unified positions on development, for legitimizing alternatives to Western hegemony. Limited because it can't act decisively on anything controversial, can't build institutions that rival Western ones, and remains dependent on members' willingness to subordinate national interests.

India's most realistic use of BRICS is as one tool among many—a platform for developing-world coalition-building, a counterweight to Western assumptions, a place to build relationships with Brazil, South Africa, and others. Not as a replacement for India's engagement with the West or as a foundation for genuine multipolar security architecture.

The broader lesson is about multipolarity itself. A truly multipolar world would require active cooperation among poles, shared institutional frameworks, and willingness to operate by new rules. BRICS is trying to create the appearance of multipolarity without doing the hard work. Until that changes, it will remain a forum for airing grievances against Western dominance rather than building something genuinely different.