New Delhi hosted the world for much of last week and somewhere between the handshakes, motorcades and joint communiqués an old Sanskrit phrase did most of the work. From being a slogan from the Maha Upanishad, the world is one family has become the working mantra of Indian statecraft, and the 18th BRICS Summit, which concluded at Bharat Mandapam on September 13, was a good test of that.

Optics were speaking for themselves. In the first 72 hours, PM Narendra Modi personally hosted five bilateral meetings with heads of state, hosted Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin within the same building and concluded the summit with a thank you to the leaders for making the talks "productive and outcome oriented. What came out of the New Delhi Declaration was a call to reform the United Nations and the international financial architecture, more representation for the Global South and cooperation plans for AI governance, an early-warning system for infectious disease, and more. After years of speculation, no common BRICS currency was announced, and that was a sign India's chairmanship was focused more on incremental, deliverable-driven cooperation than on dramatic moves meant to upset the dollar-based order.

But the language of the communiqué was not the reason to watch the summit. It was the company that they were in when they were writing it. On the sidelines of the summit, this week, a former Indian diplomat said in a no BS manner, "India is 'non-West', it's not ‘anti-West'." That is the mantra followed by Indian foreign policy under Modi, and that goes right back to an innate sense of a civilisational instinct – difference without being interpreted as hostile. New Delhi can sit down with Moscow and Washington in the same fortnight, court Israel and the Gulf states at the same time and argue for solidarity between the Global South in BRICS while strengthening its Quad ties and that's because New Delhi's founding principle is the world's differences are all within the family.

Academic scholars doing studies on regional behaviour in India began to talk of exactly that, but not as a philosophy, but rather as a clinical term, identity management. The quotes like Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam are more about a strategy than sentiment, according to a recent paper in the International Relations of the Asia-Pacific journal, which calls this the "strategic strategy" to address the “ontological insecurity” of a rising power, a psychological need to articulate a stable and coherent self-image, especially in the presence of a more assertive China. In this sense, the "world is one family" is not a line that is repeated for a G20 logo. It's a conscious fact that allows India to claim the posture of a unifying, moral actor, while hedging against the very neighbor it cannot officially antagonise militarily, economically and politically.

The business case for this approach is where the philosophy goes past being abstract. India's Economic Survey forecasted real GDP growth at 7.4 percent for the previous fiscal and the real GDP growth rate for the last four years has turned out to be the highest among the big economies, all the while inflation dropped to its lowest level since the CPI series started. Record exports in FY26, in total of goods and services, include deals with the United Kingdom, the European Union, the UAE, Australia, Oman and New Zealand. But on the same year, a violent quarrel over Russian oil orders proved the precarious nature of equidistance, as the U.S. slapped the Indian with the highest tariffs it had ever applied to any trading partner, anywhere, only to be forced to the opposite side by a Supreme Court ruling to a lesser 10 percent. The family metaphor must coexist with some very real leverage on the other side of the table the United States absorbs about 19% of India's merchandise exports, more than any single market other than the Chinese.

It's that tension that makes The more hard-nosed reading of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam worth its salt. The global-affairs giants who follow geopolitics and business closely have increasingly described India's stance as a new form of leadership: the capacity to scan markets, supply chains and power moves as keenly as to read an agenda, and to think of diplomacy as an extension of the economic agenda instead of a parallel one. From this perspective, to chair BRICS and at the same time court the European and American capital is not an oxymoron, it's a strategy of risk-taking. Keep all key powers engaged in friendship, don't let a single tariff shock or border standoff be an existential threat because no single relationship is an existential threat.

None of this reflects India's sentimentality in international politics. No family is composed of interest groups, as the old book admits; in fact, they keep the family together by being able to disagree and get along at the table. The logic of yesteryear, applied to a spreadsheet, has been what India has been doing in parallel with the de-dollarisation talks at BRICS in São Paulo, the trade table in Washington, Russian energy and American technology, Global South solidarity and the hard-nosed reciprocity in every free trade agreement it has signed. The Sanskrit line was never meant as a foreign-policy manual. Three thousand years have passed and it is now exactly that, in a country that has a growth rate of 7.4 percent and where half the permanent members of a new economic bloc are based in the same week.