How India Elevated Its Stature in a World Being Reshaped by Tariffs and Threats
Donald Trump was not in the room at Bharat Mandapam but he was the reason the room was full. When the American President threatened 100 percent tariffs on BRICS members who try to replace the dollar, when he increased tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent and added an extra 25 percent as punishment for buying Russian oil, when he threatened an additional 10 percent on countries backing what he called BRICS's anti-American policy, he was deliberately doing something that no amount of Indian diplomacy could have managed on its own. He gave the world's largest alternative multilateral forum the urgency it had been struggling to find. Eleven nations representing nearly half the world's population came to New Delhi partly because the alternative, standing alone before a tariff-wielding, sanction-wielding, dollar-wielding Washington, had become considerably more frightening than sitting in the same room as each other.
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| Image Source: @VikramMisri on X |
This is the stature argument that emerges from the summit. Not that India defied the United States — it did not, and it had no intention of doing so. India has American F-414 engines in its defence procurement pipeline. It has Quad membership. It has semiconductor partnerships with Washington that it values and intends to keep.
The stature argument is that India managed all of this simultaneously — the American relationship and the BRICS chairship, the Quad and the declaration condemning unilateral secondary sanctions, the Western partnerships and Modi's explicit warning from the Bharat Mandapam stage about the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals — without collapsing the contradiction. Because in the world as it actually exists in September 2026, the contradiction has become the policy. India is the country that can host Putin and the UAE Crown Prince and the Iranian President and Xi Jinping and the Global South's nations and tell each of them, honestly, that it is on nobody's side but its own — and have all of them come anyway.
Putin arrived on September 11, stepping off his plane at Delhi to a red carpet and a reception from Minister of State for External Affairs. This was not Modi — India does not send Prime Ministers to midnight airport arrivals for multilateral visits, as opposed to state visits. Modi had received Putin at Palam Airport in December 2025 for the bilateral summit — that gesture, which the Kremlin called a symbol of strategic friendship, is what established the warmth that the BRICS visit then carried forward. When the two men sat down together on September 11 for the bilateral, they were continuing. They went together to INNOPROM India — Russia's flagship industrial exhibition, held on Indian soil for the first time in its history. Modi also said, in Hindi, with Putin beside him: "Two thousand years ago, Thiruvalluvar wrote the Thirukkural. It has been translated into Russian. I am confident that people-to-people contact will increase with this translation, which will play a big role in strengthening our relations." He had given Putin the Russian translation at the bilateral the same morning. He explained the gift publicly at the exhibition. An Indian government account then posted a video of their moments together set to Matuska Zemlia, a Russian folk song. Instagram was flooded with reels. When Putin smiled and waved at NSA Ajit Doval during the formal welcome ceremony, a brief, unscripted moment, Indian social media called it the Dhurandhar moment and shared it lakhs of times.
This warmth is real. Indians have loved Russia for seven decades. Raj Kapoor's films ran there for a generation. Putin has a 24-hour Indian film channel in Russia. The civilisational affection predates the geopolitical relationship and has outlasted every political disruption to it. What the BRICS Summit did was make it visible again — the Indian state playing Russian folk music over a Modi-Putin montage, the crowd reacting to a presidential wave as if a movie star had arrived. It is also worth noting, as Bloomberg did, that this was Putin's first in-person BRICS appearance outside Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He chose New Delhi for the return. That tells you something about where Moscow places this relationship.
Xi arrived seven years since his last India visit. The bilateral on September 12 produced two readouts that sit five words apart. India said differences should not become disputes. China said partners. Both are telling the truth about different aspects of the same evening. The relationship is alive, contested, and carefully managed — peace and tranquility on the border named as a precondition rather than an achieved fact, the $100 billion trade deficit acknowledged without a specific plan to address it. What mattered was that Xi came, that both sides found language suitable enough to sign, and that on the summit floor Xi said the logic of might makes right does not hold and should have been discarded long ago. He proposed five initiatives for his 2027 chairship — a BRICS AI open source community, a special economic zone partnership, a digital ecosystem platform, an intelligent manufacturing support programme, a BRICS engineer cultivation alliance. He accepted the Reform Mandate Modi set.
And it is an accountability too, because Modi made it one. His closing address was not pleasantries. BRICS is not merely a group of countries, he said, but an ecosystem of solutions. The world now expects concrete results, not just ideas and commitments. He proposed a Continuity Mechanism — a Troika of outgoing India, current China, incoming whoever — with a digital repository tracking every decision and every timeline so that institutional memory does not dissolve every time the chairship rotates. He proposed a Seafarers Emergency Support Network born from two consecutive bilateral conversations — Putin first, then Pezeshkian — about Indian workers caught in the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. And paragraph 40 of the New Delhi Declaration — all eleven members, including China, condemning the Pahalgam attack by name, by date, by death toll — is the kind of outcome that requires months of diplomatic groundwork to produce and five seconds to overlook in the coverage dominated by the bilateral photographs.
Jaishankar posted two words and a hashtag: "Thank you Team MEA for a successful BRICS India 2026 Summit." Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri replied: "Thank you, Sir, for your constant support and guidance." Two lines on X. Covering the 400 meetings, the thirty cities, the twelve months, the Pahalgam paragraph, the UNSC endorsement from both P5 members, the Putin visit, the Xi bilateral, the seafarers proposal, the Thirukkural in Russian, and the 140-paragraph declaration that eleven nations signed in New Delhi before the chairship passed to Beijing.
India elevated its stature at this summit not by confronting what Trump represents but by demonstrating what the alternative looks like when it is run well. The tariffs will continue. The threats will continue. But the room at Bharat Mandapam — Iran and the UAE, Russia and China and Brazil, India and everyone simultaneously — met, signed, committed, and went home with a Reform Roadmap that Beijing now takes over.
The world will be watching what China does with the chairship. So will New Delhi. And so, from the other side of the planet, will Washington.