India, Sept. 14 -- BRICS has come of age, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his address at the 18th summit of the grouping, hosted in New Delhi over the weekend. It is indeed time for the 20-year-old multilateral platform to be evaluated in terms of how its aspirations have translated into outcomes, and, at a larger level, what the grouping represents and what it has achieved as a cohort.

With a grouping as fractured as BRICS, it is naive to expect a comprehensive consensus on all things, either in letter or in spirit. Then, why have a grouping at all, or bother with summits, goes the argument. The short answer is: In an era of forever wars and interconnectedness of global supply chains, any consensus is better than no consensus, and ...