India's WTO Plurilateral Stance Shifts After BRICS 2026 Declaration

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) operates on the principle of multilateralism: its rules apply to all members, and major decisions require consensus among all 166 members. Within this framework, plurilateral agreements are a distinct category, negotiated and implemented by a subset of willing members rather than the full membership. Under the Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO, a plurilateral agreement can be added to the WTO's family of agreements only by consensus of all members. This consensus requirement has become a major flashpoint, because a small number of countries, including India, can block the incorporation of agreements that have broad but not universal support.

India has historically championed multilateralism at the WTO. Its position rests on a principled argument: plurilateral deals, by definition, exclude developing countries that lack the capacity or interest to join, and then impose their outcomes on the broader trading system through precedent and pressure. India has also argued that investment and digital trade, the subjects of the two most contested plurilateral initiatives, are not core trade issues and therefore fall outside the WTO's proper mandate. The Fortaleza Declaration of 2014, which established the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), reflected a similar logic at the BRICS level: emerging economies building institutions outside Western-dominated frameworks to assert their own development priorities. BRICS declarations have consistently invoked multilateralism and sovereign equality as organising principles, making the grouping's 2026 language on plurilaterals a notable departure.

The 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, held under Russia's chairship, admitted Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, and Indonesia as full members, bringing total membership to ten. Its theme was 'Strengthening Multilateralism for Just Global Development and Security', a formulation worth noting precisely because it uses 'Multilateralism', not 'Multiculturalism', a distinction that has appeared in examination questions. The Delhi 2026 BRICS Summit, with India as chair, produced a declaration that built on this multilateralist rhetoric while introducing new language on plurilateral pathways, a tension that sits at the heart of this article's significance.