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Why has India’s G20 fanfare not been replicated for BRICS summit?

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When world leaders gathered in New Delhi for the G20 Summit in September 2023, the spectacle surrounding the event was impossible to miss. Under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the summit was celebrated as India’s grand arrival on the global stage. Streets were lined with banners, cultural motifs saturated the summit’s visual landscape, and official messaging projected India as the “voice of the Global South”.

Three years later, India is preparing to host the 2026 summit of BRICS, but there is a palpable contrast. Unlike the build-up to the G20, there is little of the expansive public mobilisation, symbolic messaging, or political fanfare that characterised 2023. Meanwhile, uncertainty continues to surround the summit-level meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, commonly known as the “Quad,” which was expected to take place in India this year.

At the same time, New Delhi has stepped back from hosting the 33rd Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2028, despite having earlier expressed willingness to do so. These developments suggest a more selective approach to international summitry that is shaped by altered geopolitical circumstances and the limits of reproducing diplomatic spectacle indefinitely.

Political theatre

In a recent study, I show how multinational summits function as stages of political theatre. Unlike routine foreign policy, which...