Kazakhstan is not in BRICS. In New Delhi it still set an agenda

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke in New Delhi on 13 September at the BRICS Plus plenary of the 18th summit. Kazakhstan is not a BRICS member. It joined as a partner country in 2025. That status gives Astana a place at the wider table and no vote inside the core group. Tokayev treated the format as a practical marketplace: more trade, more routes, more technology – and a complement to the United Nations, not a rival to it.

He described the moment as an age of “great fragmentation”: more military spending, weaker multilateral bodies, thicker trade barriers. BRICS, he said, accounts for nearly half the world’s population and about 40 percent of global output, and therefore has a duty to produce results rather than slogans. Kazakhstan’s line, familiar from its other clubs, was that it looks for common ground and keeps a balanced foreign policy. Partner status is how that policy now sits inside a grouping built by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and later expanded.

Trade, India and the development bank

Trade with BRICS members and partners was about $72 billion in 2025, Tokayev said. Kazakhstan wants to spread that business more widely. As current chair of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), it backs a free-trade agreement between the EAEU and India and says it will help the talks along. On the sidelines he met Narendra Modi. The two discussed energy, digital work, education and tourism, including links between Astana Hub and Hyderabad’s technology cluster. Tokayev put the number of Indian-capital firms in Kazakhstan at about 600 and said nearly 150,000 Indian citizens visited last year. He also asked the New Development Bank – the BRICS lender – to look at commercially sound projects in member and partner countries, including Kazakhstan.

Geography as a product

Transit through Kazakhstan reached almost 40 million tonnes last year. The official target is 100 million tonnes a year. Tokayev said the country’s network already carries up to 85 percent of overland freight between China and Europe. He called for closer fit between the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (the Middle Corridor across the Caspian), China’s Belt and Road, and the International North-South Transport Corridor. The pitch is simple: Kazakhstan sits on the land bridge and wants BRICS cargo, not only Chinese and European cargo.

Minerals, machines and water

Critical minerals sit behind that transit story. Officials in Astana have been telling partners they do not only want to ship ore. They want processing, components and defined projects – resource, site, power, water, technology partner, buyer and finance. Tokayev did not turn the New Delhi speech into a mining catalogue. He did place minerals on the same list as trade and logistics, which is how Kazakhstan now sells itself: a corridor that also holds the metals the energy transition needs.

On technology he proposed a BRICS Plus Partnership in Artificial Intelligence: link national AI centres, open labs and research projects, and work on multilingual systems. Kazakhstan, he said, can put up computing capacity and its national and UN digital centres. Water was the other long-running Kazakh file. Global water governance, Tokayev argued, is fragmented. He restated the proposal for an International Water Organization as a UN specialised agency and invited BRICS members and partners into consultations Kazakhstan has already started.

What the speech was – and was not

For Kazakhstan, BRICS can provide an additional platform for expanding economic ties beyond its traditional partners, particularly with major economies in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. However, BRICS membership or partnership does not automatically increase trade. The grouping is not a customs union and does not create a common market or uniform tariffs.

It was not an application to join the inner circle. It was a partner-country shopping list delivered in the host’s capital: use BRICS demand to diversify exports, use BRICS finance where projects add up, use BRICS meetings to move an EAEU–India trade deal, and park two Kazakh initiatives – AI networking and a UN water body – on a larger agenda.

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This article draws on reporting by EUalive’s partner The Astana Times.

Caption: A handout photo made available by India’s Ministry of External Affairs shows Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (L) posing for photographs before the ‘Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability: Shaping the Future for Inclusive Global Growth’ session at the 18th BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi, India, 13 September 2026. India is hosting the 18th BRICS Leaders’ Summit from 12 to 13 September 2026 under the theme ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability.’ EPA/INDIA’S MINISTRY OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS / HANDOUT