Summits are usually experienced by the public as traffic advisories. India spent its BRICS chairship year trying to make this one something else, and the evidence is scattered across New Delhi in the form of a film festival, a bazaar, a food festival, a painted wall and a running event.
Cultural and people-to-people exchange is one of the three pillars India nominated for its chairship, alongside political and security matters and economic and financial cooperation. In practice that meant a BRICS Film Festival, a BRICS Bazaar, a BRICS Food Festival, a mural wall painting showcase, a BRICS Quiz and a solidarity run and cycling event, run over the months leading into the leaders’ sessions at Bharat Mandapam.
The Ministry of Textiles and the Ministry of External Affairs staged a BRICS cultural evening at the National Crafts Museum in February, an early marker of how the year would be framed. Handicrafts have run through the programme since, including a showcase inside Bharat Mandapam itself — the same building hosting the closed economic sessions.
Delhi itinerary
Visiting leaders’ spouses are scheduled for a Delhi tour built around the city’s split personality: Chandni Chowk for the seventeenth-century commercial core, Khan Market for the version of Delhi that appears in property listings. The itinerary is designed to move guests between heritage, markets and the modern city rather than parking them in a convention centre.
Even the press kit was pressed into service. Media goodie bags distributed at the summit carried Indian handicrafts and regional food items — sattu among them — as a low-cost showcase of state-level produce to a room full of foreign correspondents.
The organising idea has a name. New Delhi has run the year under Jan Bhagidari, or people’s participation, the same framing India used for its G20 presidency, and applied it by pushing BRICS programming out of the capital. More than 350 BRICS-related meetings were held across 25-plus Indian cities, spanning academic, youth, startup, business and cultural events.
Whether any of it registers beyond the week is a fair question. Cultural diplomacy is the hardest part of a summit to measure and the first line item cut when budgets tighten. A film festival does not lower a tariff.
What it does do is give a bloc of eleven members and ten partner countries something to be other than a communiqué. India’s chairship theme — "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability," under a stated vision of "Humanity First" — is the kind of language that means nothing until somebody attaches an event to it. For a year, somebody did.
