BRICS members reached consensus after negotiations continued until 4:00 am Saturday.
India worked to bridge differences among Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE.
Declaration is expected to support multilateralism, UN reform and local currencies.
Leaders at the 18th BRICS Summit are set to adopt the Delhi Declaration on Saturday, sources in the government said.
Releasing the joint declaration at the very end of the summit is itself a signal of how hard consensus is to reach among an 11-member grouping whose members often pull in different directions.
As per the sources, the BRICS countries have reached consensus on a joint statement after intensive negotiations that continued until 4:00 am on Saturday.
During the meeting, the negotiations saw differences on several contentious issues. “India led sustained consultations to bridge competing positions and build consensus among members.”
“The breakthrough assumes particular significance given that Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are all part of the same forum, despite deep differences and competing positions on several regional and geopolitical issues.”
“Against the backdrop of ongoing conflicts and heightened tensions in West Asia, securing consensus among countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE presented a particularly complex diplomatic challenge.”
“India’s diplomatic prowess ensured that these differences did not derail the BRICS process, paving the way for a consensus joint statement despite sharply divergent geopolitical positions among member countries.”
Unlike the G7, where communiqués are shorter affairs, every BRICS declaration is negotiated line by line by sherpas and goes to heads of state for final sign-off only after the wording is locked.
This year’s negotiations have been harder than usual, largely because the bloc holds together countries with starkly different views on the Iran-Israel conflict, sanctions, and ties with the United States and Europe.
The question of how far to go in criticising Washington has run through much of the summit.
Russia, China and Iran have pushed for tougher language on unilateral sanctions, greater use of national currencies in trade, and reform of financial institutions still dominated by the West.
Tehran, in particular, wants BRICS to say more about cutting reliance on the US dollar and building alternative payment systems within the bloc.
India has taken a different line, resisting any drift towards BRICS being seen as an anti-Western bloc.
New Delhi backs a multipolar world order and reform of bodies such as the UN Security Council, but it also has strategic partnerships with Washington and European capitals to protect.
Foreign policy experts say India’s central task has been finding wording that criticises unilateral measures without naming the US outright or turning the declaration into a manifesto against the West.
Former diplomat Suresh Goyal said it was encouraging that delegations holding opposite positions were willing to compromise for the sake of BRICS’s unity, adding that a joint statement would also give the Global South a roadmap for economic cooperation.
Why the BRICS foreign ministers couldn’t agree in May
When BRICS foreign ministers met in New Delhi in May, the two-day meeting ended without any joint statement at all, only a chair's statement from India.
The reason was the Iran war. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had urged BRICS members to condemn what he called unlawful US and Israeli aggression against Tehran.
The United Arab Emirates pushed back hard: its representative accused Araghchi of trying to justify attacks on the UAE and other Gulf states, saying Iran had fired about 3,000 missiles and drones at the UAE.
India said afterwards that there were “differing views among some members” on the Middle East, and its statement focused instead on the areas where consensus did exist, such as UN reform.
That Iran-UAE rift did not go away over the summer, and it is one of the main reasons this summit’s declaration needed extensive closed-door negotiation before it could be finalised.
Why the declaration comes after the summit
The Delhi Declaration is expected to back multilateralism, reform of global governance institutions, resilient supply chains, digital public infrastructure, climate finance, counter-terrorism cooperation and greater trade in local currencies.
It is also likely to repeat support for a bigger role for developing countries in global decision-making, including India's bid for a permanent seat on a reformed UN Security Council.
Beyond the economic commitments, the declaration will be the clearest test of whether BRICS can still project unity even as the divisions within it, visible since the May foreign ministers' meeting, continue to widen.
