When India spoke for Palestine at BRICS, what changed?
The 2026 BRICS New Delhi Declaration backed a sovereign Palestinian state, opposed forced displacement from Gaza and cited international law and the ICJ — raising questions about whether India’s carefully balanced Palestine-Israel policy is beginning to shift.
For a country that has spent the last decade carefully balancing its deepening strategic partnership with Israel against its historic support for Palestine, the language emerging from New Delhi is difficult to ignore.
At the 18th BRICS Summit, India did not use the word genocide. It did not directly accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. Nor did it announce a rupture with Tel Aviv.
But the New Delhi Declaration did something more politically consequential: it placed Palestinian sovereignty, forced displacement, occupation, humanitarian law and Israel’s international legal obligations at the centre of a major multilateral declaration adopted under India’s chairmanship.
BRICS reaffirmed support for the State of Palestine’s full membership of the United Nations and backed a sovereign, independent and viable Palestinian state within the internationally recognised 1967 borders, including Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
It also opposed the forced displacement — temporary or permanent — of Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territory and rejected demographic or geographic changes to Gaza. The declaration condemned starvation as a method of warfare, attacks on civilians and healthcare facilities, and obstruction of humanitarian assistance. It even cited the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice in the proceedings brought by South Africa against Israel.
That is significant. But it is not a sudden Indian recognition of Palestine.
New Delhi recognised Palestine in 1988, long before it established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992. India has consistently supported Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution.
The real shift, therefore, lies in the vocabulary of it.
For years, India's position on Gaza has been characterised by a careful diplomatic balancing act: reiterating support for Palestinian statehood while maintaining an increasingly consequential relationship with Israel in defence, technology, intelligence and trade. The Modi government has also cultivated an unusually close relationship with Israel compared with earlier Indian governments.
Now, that balance is being articulated in a different international setting — BRICS.
And BRICS itself was unusually blunt about the architecture of global power.
The declaration condemned unilateral economic and secondary sanctions not authorised by the UN Security Council and criticised unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures as distortions of the global trading system. It called for a more representative international order and greater voice for emerging and developing economies.
The United States was not named as the villain. Israel was not directly named in every passage either.
The 11-member bloc contains countries with radically different strategic interests. Iran sits alongside the UAE, while India maintains close ties with Washington and Israel. The declaration therefore uses the language of international law, sovereignty and multilateralism rather than explicitly turning BRICS into an anti-US or anti-Israel alliance. Reuters noted precisely this difficulty: reaching consensus was complicated by the presence of Iran and the UAE, given their opposing regional alignments.
And this is where India's role becomes particularly interesting.
Reports described New Delhi as resisting attempts to turn BRICS into an explicitly anti-Western geopolitical bloc, while keeping the forum focused on practical cooperation, development and strategic autonomy.
So has India finally chosen Palestine over Israel?
Not quite.
But something has changed in the way India is willing to speak about Palestine.
The BRICS declaration has allowed New Delhi to move beyond the familiar formula of two states living side by side and endorse language around occupation, forced displacement, humanitarian violations, Jerusalem and international legal accountability — without explicitly breaking with Israel.
That may be the diplomatic innovation.
Not a rupture with Israel.
Not an embrace of an anti-American bloc.
But an attempt to redraw the limits of India's strategic partnership: Israel can remain a strategic partner, while India's multilateral diplomacy becomes increasingly unwilling to remain silent on what happens in Gaza.
And perhaps that is why the most important word in this BRICS declaration is not genocide.
It is sovereignty.
