The expanded BRICS alliance confronted severe internal fragmentation at the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi, where new entrants Iran and the UAE reportedly locked horns as the UAE alleged outright Iranian aggression against its sovereign territory, while Iran accused the Emirates of complicity with the United States and Israel, further asserting that Abu Dhabi had been directly involved in hostile military operations against Tehran.
This vitriolic confrontation between the bloc’s newest constituents severely jeopardised the finalisation of a joint communique, thereby underscoring the formidable geopolitical obstacles impeding a unified BRICS consensus on the volatile West Asian conflict.
The escalatory rhetoric reached a flashpoint when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, responding directly to what Iran described as the unyielding provocations of Emirati Minister of State Khalifa Shaheen Al Marar, explicitly castigated the UAE for granting strategic airspace, military installations and logistical facilities to the US-Israeli coalition.
Araghchi further invoked the catastrophic February 28 airstrike on an elementary school in Minab, an assault which Iran claims killed more than 170 students, and lambasted the Emirati delegation for what he described as its conspicuous failure to condemn the continuing carnage.
Iranian representative Kazem Gharibabadi invoked historical United Nations resolutions on state aggression to formalise Iran’s stance, refuting the Emirati assertions of unprovoked Iranian belligerence and recharacterising the UAE not as a mere passive accomplice, but as an active, aggressive combatant.
Amidst these escalating regional animosities, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar delivered a subtly veiled admonition during his inaugural remarks, pointedly noting that the sustainable progression of the expanded alliance imperatively requires its newest members to wholeheartedly subscribe to established multilateral consensus.
This internal rupture was further exacerbated by contentious, unverified reports regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alleged clandestine rendezvous with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, alongside clandestine military intelligence disclosures detailed in the Western press.
While the Emirati delegation steadfastly maintained that its diplomatic engagements remain strictly circumscribed by the transparent tenets of the Abraham Accords, the pervasive distrust effectively paralysed substantive multilateral deliberations.