Managing Overlap, Maximising Leverage: India Between BRICS and SCO

India's simultaneous membership in BRICS and the SCO is often read as evidence of expanding multilateral heft. The more consequential question, however, is whether India can differentiate its engagement with each grouping to serve distinct strategic ends, rather than treating both as interchangeable platforms of "Global South" solidarity.

Divergent Functional Logic

  • BRICS is primarily an economic-financial vehicle — the New Development Bank, discussions on de-dollarisation, and reform of global financial governance align with India's interest in diversifying institutional dependence away from Bretton Woods structures.
  • The SCO, by contrast, is a Eurasian security and connectivity forum, oriented towards counter-terrorism cooperation, regional stability in Central Asia, and Afghanistan-related concerns — domains where India's stakes are geographically immediate rather than systemic.

The China-Russia Asymmetry

  • Both groupings are shaped by Chinese and Russian preferences, but unevenly.
  • China's centrality in BRICS raises the risk of the grouping drifting toward an anti-Western posture India does not fully share, whereas Russia's weight in the SCO offers India a counterbalancing channel against Chinese dominance in Eurasian security architecture.
  • This asymmetry is precisely what allows differentiated leverage rather than bloc capture.

Strategic Autonomy Through Compartmentalisation

  • India's approach reflects issue-based multi-alignment: extracting financial and institutional value from BRICS while using the SCO for regional stability and connectivity, without allowing either to constrain its Quad or Indo-Pacific commitments.
  • This compartmentalisation — treating overlapping memberships as functionally distinct rather than ideologically unified — is itself the strategic asset.

Summing Up
India's leverage lies not in reconciling BRICS and SCO into a coherent worldview, but in preserving their separateness, allowing each to serve interests the other cannot, while resisting subordination to any single power's strategic architecture.