When the eleven leaders of BRICS gathered in New Delhi this September for the 18th Summit, the optics alone told a story. The New Delhi Declaration was adopted unanimously, calling for calm in West Asia, backing a two-state solution, and pushing for trade, energy stability and reduced reliance on the US dollar. Eleven flags flew at Bharat Mandapam, Pakistan’s was not among them. Islamabad has now watched three consecutive expansion cycles pass it by, even as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE joined as full members in 2024, and Indonesia followed in 2025. The question worth asking isn’t just “why has India blocked Pakistan,” which is well documented, but a more useful one: on the merits, political and economic, does Pakistan actually fit the bloc it wants to join?
The Consensus Problem Is Structural, Not Just Political
One can say that this is nothing more than India vs. Pakistan in the larger sense. This may be correct to an extent. But under the BRICS guidelines, a new country can only enter if all members agree to it unanimously, and India will have veto power over Pakistan entering. But framing this purely as Indian obstruction understates something structural: BRICS built consensus admission into its rules precisely because it wants members who won’t import bilateral conflict into the bloc’s decision-making machinery. The standards for BRICS membership expansion, agreed at the 2023 Johannesburg summit, require compliance from all members and partner countries, a design choice, not an accident.
Pakistan has tried to route around this obstacle for three years running. It formally applied in 2023, calling BRICS an important group of developing countries and framing membership as a way to strengthen multilateralism. It has leaned hard on Moscow, hoping the relationship might tip the balance. Russia had signalled openness to Pakistan’s bid and reportedly considered using its 2024 host-year prerogative to override objections from other members. None of it has worked, because the veto isn’t a technicality Islamabad can out-lobby, it’s the mechanism BRICS chose specifically to prevent a bilateral quarrel from being dragged, unresolved, into a bloc that needs unity to function. A group trying to project itself as a coherent alternative pole to the G7 has every institutional incentive to keep out any applicant whose accession would hand one existing member permanent grounds for internal friction.
What Pakistan Would Actually Bring to the Table
Set the politics aside for a moment and look at why Pakistan wants in. The motivation is almost entirely defensive economics, not the kind of complementary heft BRICS has historically sought from new entrants. In 2026, Pakistan has achieved an economy with real progress in fiscal responsibility, the deficit falling under 1% of GDP for the first time in its history, record remittances of $38.3 billion and upgrade of sovereign rating by S&P to B minus. However, the GDP growth of 3.7% is only marginally higher than the population growth of 2% and hence there is no improvement in per capita income. This is a $452-billion economy propped up by its twenty-fourth IMF programme, not a rising industrial or trading power looking to add scale to a bloc that already includes China, India and Russia.
That dependency shapes the pitch itself. Pakistan’s push is driven largely by domestic economic troubles, with GDP growth of just 3.70% reflecting the pressure Islamabad is under to find new sources of financial support. The appeal of BRICS institutions like the New Development Bank is explicit as unlike the IMF, the NDB imposes no conditions and no single member can veto another’s borrowing based on economic size, while also allowing loans in local currency, a valuable feature given Pakistan’s volatile reserves. In other words, Pakistan isn’t approaching BRICS as a peer offering market access, manufacturing capacity or reserve diversification the way founding members did. It’s approaching BRICS as a financing backstop, one more line of credit alongside the IMF, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and China. There’s another angle worth adding here. BRICS keeps making public commitments to fight terrorism. The New Delhi Declaration this year condemned the 2025 Pahalgam attack, which killed 26 people, and pointed to Pakistan-based groups behind it. All eleven members, including China, signed on. The declaration called for zero tolerance on terrorism and action against safe havens and terror financing. International agencies have flagged groups based in Pakistan for years. Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan are all UN-designated terrorist entities operating out of Pakistani soil. So a bloc that keeps pledging action against terror safe havens is being asked, year after year, to admit the very country its own declarations point to. \
The Full Picture
Line up everything above, and the picture holds together on its own. BRICS wants members who add real economic weight. Pakistan doesn’t bring that, it’s leaning on the bloc for financing, not adding to its combined economic strength. BRICS also runs on consensus, which means it needs members who won’t jam up its decision-making. Pakistan’s relationship with a founding member, India, is tense enough that it has blocked entry through two full rounds of expansion already. And BRICS keeps writing pledges into its own declarations, summit after summit, about fighting terrorism and shutting down safe havens, a pledge that sits awkwardly next to what independent data and the UN’s own sanctions list say about Pakistan.
None of these three gaps stands alone. Together, they point the same way. This isn’t really about one country disliking another. It’s about what a bloc like BRICS actually needs to function: weight, stability and credibility on its own stated priorities. Pakistan’s case falls short on all three at once. And a bloc pushing hard this year on unity and practical results has even less reason to make room for a member who’d bring friction to every one of them, while adding little in return.
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Sachin Yadav
Sachin Yadav is a Ph.D. scholar in International Studies at Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi With a background in economics and education. His research focuses on South Asia, India’s Neighbourhood and Geoeconomics.
