Plan of Action Proves Elusive for Emerging Economies in BRICS NEW DELHI - Back in 2009, as the shock waves of the global recession convulsed Europe and the United States, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China gathered for a meeting that seemed to signal a new era. They had global buzz as rising economic powers, a catchy acronym, BRIC, and an ambitious agenda to remake an international monetary system long dominated by the West. Three years later, the new BRIC era has yet to arrive. When the group's leaders meet in New Delhi on Thursday, their biggest achievement will have been adding an S: they took on South Africa last year. The five BRICS nations still rank among the fastest-growing economies in the world, and, even if growth has slowed, individually, their global influence continues to rise. But they have struggled to find the common ground necessary to act as a unified geopolitical alliance. "The real issue for them is to come up with agreed objectives, and also agree on common actions," said Brahma Chellaney, a foreign affairs analyst with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. That is a tough nut. The BRICS are still a new group, and some analysts argue that with time they could become a more cohesive alliance. But for now, they are beset by internal rivalries and contradictions that have stymied the group's ability to take any significant action toward a primary goal: reforming Western-dominated international financial institutions. Since its inception, the group has discussed creating a development bank to rival the World Bank, and on Wednesday a Chinese official expressed hope that a breakthrough might come this week. Yet to date the proposal has been stalled, partly over worries that China would dominate the new institution. Last year, the five countries could not agree on a new leader for the International Monetary Fund. Nor have they endorsed a candidate to replace Robert Zoellick as head of the World Bank. President Obama recently proposed Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth College. In other spheres, the group has been splintered. National security and terrorism are common concerns, yet the members are not always in alignment, the most recent division being Iran's nuclear ambitions. Reports in the Indian news media this week indicated that the group might try to carve out a joint position on Syria. India is actively lobbying for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, a move China has resisted endorsing. "It's not a policy bloc at all," said Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's really a photo op. It is really this idea that the West is no longer or should no longer be viewed as the only center of gravity. Deep internal political and economic differences complicate the prospects for unity. India, Brazil and South Africa are democracies and have already used their own separate trilateral group, IBSA, as a primary platform for coordinating positions on several major diplomatic issues. Russia, however, has drifted away from democracy toward strongman rule under Vladimir V. Putin. China is the world's largest authoritarian state and has by far the largest and most powerful economy in BRICS, which creates a complicated dynamic. China is the heavyweight, and thus the natural leader of the group, except that it is the political outlier. As such, distrust is high between India and China, whose decades-old border dispute is fueling a quiet military buildup on both sides. The two countries differ sharply on Pakistan and the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. Trade is growing rapidly, but India complains that China has done too little to open its market to Indian firms. China, meanwhile, is suspicious that India is pursuing a containment policy, in league with the United States, through its diplomatic outreach to East Asian nations like South Korea, Japan, Australia and Indonesia. "The real story is there is a contradiction between China and India," said C. Raja Mohan, a leading strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. As long as you don't solve that, what collective rhetoric you talk about will have limited value. The BRICS alliance has existed as a concept since 2001, when Jim O'Neill, a Goldman Sachs economist, identified Brazil, Russia, India and China as rising economic powers and argued that they should play larger roles in global economic policymaking, perhaps by joining the established Group of 7. Earlier, in the 1990s, Russia had already organized a triangular group with India and China - known as RIC - but the attention generated by Mr. O'Neill's formulation apparently prompted these three to subsequently add Brazil and create a new political club.