Every diplomatic correspondent in Delhi is currently hyperventilating over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s itinerary. Between packing for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit and hosting the upcoming BRICS gathering, media analysts are churning out the usual predictable commentary. They write about heavy expectations, high-stakes multilateral optics, and the eternal, exhausting fantasy that the United Nations Security Council is finally about to fling open its permanent doors to India.
It is a comfortable narrative. It is also completely detached from reality. Learn more on a similar topic: this related article.
If you judge India’s foreign policy success by how many joint communiques mention UN reform or how warmly Modi shakes hands across a conference table in Central Asia, you are watching the trailer while missing the entire feature film. Multilateral summits have devolved into expensive talking shops where declining powers pretend to manage a multipolar world while actual economic and security architectures are built elsewhere, quietly and without consensus.
Let us dismantle the lazy consensus piece by piece. More analysis by The New York Times explores similar perspectives on the subject.
The UNSC Expansion Delusion
The perennial media obsession with India securing a permanent seat at the UN Security Council relies on a category error. Commentators treat the UN like a meritocracy where getting good grades—such as leading the Global South, maintaining economic growth, or managing demographic scale—earns you a promotion to the board of directors.
History disagrees. The five permanent members did not acquire veto power because they deserved it on moral or demographic grounds; they acquired it because they won a catastrophic global war in 1945 and possessed atomic arsenals. No state with a permanent veto is going to vote to dilute its own authority simply because India files another well-reasoned dossier on representative governance.
When Beijing routinely places technical holds on cross-border terror designations or Washington offers lukewarm, conditional backing for Indian ambitions, they are telling you the truth in diplomatic code: the club is closed. Treating a permanent UNSC seat as an urgent deliverable rather than a distant, structural impossibility leads to constant strategic disappointment. New Delhi does not need a plaque in Manhattan to exercise hard power; treating the UN structure as the primary scorecard of Indian relevance is a trap.
The SCO Is Not An Anti-Western Alliance
Another favorite pastime of lazy foreign policy writing is casting the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as an Asian counter-NATO, an eastern axis designed to challenge Western hegemony.
Imagine a scenario where a multilateral organization includes nuclear-armed rivals with active border disputes, nations under crushing secondary sanctions, and Central Asian republics desperate to avoid choosing sides between Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. That is not an alliance. That is a holding room.
India’s presence in the SCO is not about forging an anti-Western brotherhood. It is about spatial insurance. New Delhi sits at that table because leaving Central Asian security architecture entirely to a Sino-Russian condominium would be catastrophic for Indian continental strategy. India uses the platform to project a distinct vision against cross-border terrorism and maintain connectivity options through INSTC corridors, not to sign up for a Beijing-led economic bloc. Conflating attendance with alignment is rookie-level analysis.
BRICS And The De-Dollarization Mirage
Then comes the BRICS summit circuit, where breathless headline writers predict the imminent demise of the greenback and the rise of a unified currency.
Let’s look at the financial mechanics. Bilateral trade between India and Russia surged significantly, jumping to nearly sixty billion dollars, yet it exposed a glaring structural vulnerability: a massive trade deficit heavily tilted in Moscow’s favor alongside severe payment mechanism bottlenecks. When two major economic partners struggle to find mutually agreeable settlement currencies without accumulating trapped rupees or navigating secondary sanction tripwires, the grand rhetoric of alternative financial systems hits a brick wall.
BRICS is not a monetary union in waiting. It is a diverse collection of sovereign states with competing national interests, conflicting territorial claims, and completely different macroeconomic cycles. China wants an alternative order centered explicitly around its own industrial overcapacity; India wants strategic autonomy and plurilateral hedging. Pretending these fundamental contradictions do not exist because leaders smile for a group photo is lazy journalism.
The Real Game Is Bilateral And Transactional
The actual work of Indian foreign policy does not happen in plenary sessions or through paragraphs negotiated into consensus declarations. It happens in the margins.
When security advisers and foreign ministers sit down behind closed doors, they are not discussing global governance reform. They are managing supply chains, locking down critical mineral access, securing defense hardware maintenance schedules, and quietly establishing red lines in maritime domains.
Stop asking whether Modi’s latest diplomatic tour will unlock UN reform or reshape the global security architecture overnight. The questions themselves are flawed. The real metric of success is ruthless pragmatism: how many bilateral friction points were mitigated, how much energy security was locked down for the next fiscal quarter, and how effectively India continues to bend the multipolar landscape to its own national interest without getting shackled to any single declining power block.
The summits are theater. The bilateral ledgers are reality. Focus on the ledgers.
