BRICS leaders unanimously adopted the New Delhi Declaration at the close of the 18th summit on September 12, a carefully worded document that called for Middle East restraint without directly condemning either the US-Israeli strikes or Iran’s actions against Gulf states.
That kind of carefully hedged language is what you’d expect from a document that has to satisfy every member state simultaneously — its value is symbolic and directional, not operational. The more consequential outcome of the summit happened alongside it, not inside it.
India’s mediating role in securing a joint statement between the UAE and Iran, with negotiations reportedly running until 4 am, is a genuinely load-bearing diplomatic achievement: it moved two specific parties from no agreement to a joint statement, which is a different order of accomplishment than a multilateral declaration everyone was always going to sign.
That distinction is worth generalizing beyond diplomacy: in any large multi-stakeholder negotiation, the headline joint document is frequently the least interesting output — the real work happens in the side conversations it creates space for, between parties who wouldn’t otherwise have been in the same room.
For India specifically, hosting the summit gave it exactly that kind of convening leverage, and using it to broker a bilateral breakthrough between two other countries is a more durable demonstration of diplomatic capability than anything in the formal text of the Declaration itself.
The 18th BRICS Summit brought together leaders and senior delegations from member states including Russia, China, South Africa, Iran and several newer bloc entrants.
Major summit themes included artificial intelligence cooperation, energy security, and stronger representation for Global South nations in international institutions.
The declaration’s adoption came after member states worked through sharp differences on the West Asia conflict and other contentious geopolitical issues in the lead-up to the summit.
The New Delhi Declaration called for restraint in the Middle East but stopped short of condemning either the US-Israeli strikes or Iran’s targeting of Gulf countries in the region.
Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0