The images will be images from before: motorcades, flags, a family photo set against the Delhi skyline during the late monsoon on September 12 and 13 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosts his fellow BRICS leaders at Bharat Mandapam. The more intangible, but more significant shift is India's stance in the room. Fourteen years ago, India took over the chairmanship of this group in 2012 and came as a petitioner, seeking space in a system that was built in Bretton Woods and Washington to accommodate ‘periphery’ economies. That petitioner is now more like an architect as India wraps up its fourth chairmanship and is just celebrating the 20-year anniversary of the founding of BRICS this week.

It's not a mere rhetorical flourish that the shift is taking place. It appears in figures being monitored by international organisations for months. IMF data shows that the share of the BRICS economies is now near 40 percent compared with the 29 percent of the G7 economies on a purchasing power parity basis.

The same is true of trade, as UNCTAD data shows that the bloc's merchandise exports more than doubled, from below a trillion dollars in 2003 to approximately six trillion dollars in 2024 a rise from about 12 percent of world trade in 2003 to 24 percent of global trade in 2024. Intra-bloc commerce has experienced more than a thirteenfold increase during the period, from 84 billion dollars to approximately 1.17 trillion dollars. The newer members since 2024 (Saudi Arabia's slow-walked overture notwithstanding) have joined those others with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Indonesia already carrying outsized economic weight through China, India, Russia and Brazil.

But, as Indian officials have been careful not to hide, the same data has a caveat. The value of trade between the BRICS members is still only about 5 per cent of the global trade volume at $1.17 trillion, a testament that scale does not equal integration. This imbalance is exacerbated by China's dominance within the bloc. Beijing contributes nearly seven out of every 10 BRICS' GDP, while the trade volume between India and China is also highly imbalanced, with Indian exports to China in the double-digit billion dollar mark, as compared to flows of exports in the range of a few tens of billions. This is the awkward maths that lurks under the diplomatic ballet: India is a leader of a bloc where its biggest partner is also its biggest trade deficit and most complex strategic partnership.

That is why New Delhi has been so deliberately lacklustre in its messaging this year. Officials conveying information about the summit have consistently avoided mentions of any type of BRICS currency or an attempt to replace the dollar, opting instead for "payment connectivity" and "interoperability. Sameep Shastri, president of the BRICS Chamber of Commerce and Industry, neatly came up with that calibration this week, saying the extent to which currency diversification can go will depend on issues of convertibility, transaction costs, and regulatory clarity, and "the objective is not a frontal attack on an existing system, it is to make trade more resilient and more choices.

That's a distinction that matters. In the past two years, Washington's patience has worn thin significantly toward this project a broad 10 percent tariff on BRICS economies that was later raised to a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian and Indian products and even more so when the threat of even greater tariffs is explicitly linked to dollar replacement discussions. This is the first year that every statement by the BRICS has been prepared under that stress, even if it's never actually mentioned.

It's not currency politics but delivery capacity that India is selling this week. Digital Public Infrastructure — the UPI-based payments system, Aadhaar-based identity systems, open digital health records — is New Delhi's signature, among developing economies that can afford to bypass the decades of institution-building that have been taken for granted in the West. The same spirit guided India's response during the pandemic, which was based on the sharing of health-related information rather than “vaccine weaponisation,” as the government described it. The most visible institutional anniversary of the earlier supplicant diplomacy of Indian BRICS chairmanship between 2012 and 2014 is the New Development Bank, which manifests itself as the proof that the grouping can build instead of just lobby.

The near term test is in practice quite different from the long horizon test and India's chairmanship this year has sought to engage in both at once, rather than either. In the tactical present, it means working out how those leaders will show up, with Vladimir Putin confirmed and Xi Jinping's arrival not yet confirmed, but preparations are underway that he will come it would be his first visit to India since the Mamallapuram summit in 2019, which was not attended by the Chinese leader and how the two leaders can undertake bilateral repair work during the sidelines of a formal meeting that formal meetings cannot achieve.

For the longer arc, it translates to making subtle progress on the plumbing: the mBridge settlement rails, gold reserves, which have now grown beyond 6,100 tonnes across the enlarged block, and a meeting of finance ministers in Mumbai this week, which the leaders will sign off on in September. Both tracks are not canceled. A decade ago, a grouping that wanted recognition of its right to exist is now putting in its second decade building the machinery that recognition alone has never managed to supply: imperfectly, unevenly, and with China's shadown over nearly every ledger, but nonetheless building. It will be a nother question whether that equipment will ever equal the system it has been at odds with all these years. It will prove that India does not shrug off such a question.