Why the Most Important Meeting of Modi's Career May Happen This Weekend in New Delhi
The Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi will host the 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit on September 12 and 13. This will be the culmination of India's fourth chairship of a grouping that has, in twenty years, gone from an economist's acronym to an eleven-nation bloc representing nearly half the world's population. Vladimir Putin is confirmed. Xi Jinping is expected, though Beijing has not formally said so — his preparations are underway and if he arrives it will be his first visit to India since the informal summit with Modi at Mamallapuram in October 2019. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and several other leaders from member and partner nations are on the list. Central government offices in Delhi are closed tomorrow for logistics. The capital has been building toward this for months.
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| File Photo/Representational; Via: @AmitShah on X |
The world is in the middle of something it does not yet have a clean name for. The post-Cold War order — American primacy, the Washington Consensus, the Bretton Woods institutions as the unchallengeable architecture of global finance — is not ending dramatically. It is fraying at multiple points simultaneously. Trump's tariff escalations have shaken the multilateral trading system. The war in Ukraine has fractured European security assumptions and accelerated the search for non-dollar settlement routes. The Iran conflict's energy disruptions have reached every kitchen in India and every boardroom in the Global South. And China, the largest economy in BRICS, the largest trading partner of most countries on earth, is watching its own relationship with the United States deteriorate in ways that are forcing every other country to calculate where it stands.
India is not neutral in this moment. It is something more interesting than neutral. It is strategically non-aligned in the original sense of that phrase. India is not uncommitted but committed to its own interests rather than to any bloc's agenda. Modi went to Kyiv and to Moscow. He spoke at the UN General Assembly and met Xi at Tianjin. He hosted the G20, oversaw the successful execution of Operation Sindoor and has made attempts to position India as a bridge between the Global South and the major powers. The BRICS chairship is the latest expression of this positioning and the theme India chose for it — "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" — is deliberately free of the confrontational language that Russia and China have used in previous editions to frame the grouping as a counter to Western dominance.
That distinction is India's contribution to this summit and it matters. EAM Jaishankar had notably said at the January logo launch: "India views BRICS as a constructive platform for dialogue and development, complementing the broader multilateral system." This was a declaration that India intends to use BRICS to reform the international order from inside rather than build an alternative to it from outside. Whether that is wisdom or limitation depends on your view of whether the existing system can be reformed but it is a coherent position, and it separates India's vision for BRICS from the vision that Russia and some others bring to it.
The practical agenda being pursued in New Delhi reflects this. The headlines will be about de-dollarisation but the actual work being done is considerably more precise and more interesting. The bloc has seemingly shelved the idea of a common BRICS currency. That was always a fantasy dressed as strategy. What is on the table instead is local currency settlement frameworks that reduce transaction costs for bilateral trade without replacing the dollar as the global reserve; central bank digital currency interconnection, with the RBI proposing to link India's e-rupee with the digital yuan and other BRICS CBDCs through a shared settlement rail; a BRICS+ SME Financing Facility backed by India's SIDBI and EXIM Bank providing credit guarantees across member states; the New Development Bank's commitment to 30 percent of loans in local currencies; and India's Digital Public Infrastructure — UPI, DigiLocker, the Aadhaar-linked architecture — offered as a model for implementation across the Global South.
These are mechanisms. India's chairship has run 35 working-group tracks and hundreds of ministerial meetings across the country through 2026 precisely because Modi's team seems to understand that the difference between a summit that produces a joint statement and a summit that produces something durable is the technical groundwork laid before the leaders arrive. The Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors met in Mumbai recently to set the table. The iBRICS sovereign capital summit has gathered more than 500 institutional investors at a parallel gathering to map non-dollar settlement routes for a $1 trillion pool of sovereign capital. The machinery is running.
But there are also contradictions in the machinery that honest assessment cannot ignore. Intra-BRICS trade represents only 20 percent of South-South trade despite BRICS members accounting for over two-thirds of the Global South's GDP. The grouping is economically underdeveloped relative to its diplomatic weight for sure. India promotes rupee-denominated trade and UPI integration as instruments of local currency sovereignty; India also pays for Russian crude oil in Chinese yuan because the rupee does not yet have sufficient liquidity in Moscow. The aspiration and the practice are not yet the same thing and the gap between them is where BRICS skeptics find their most volatile arguments.
The Xi question is the summit's most watched variable. If he arrives, and the preparations suggest he will, it will be the first time India and China's leaders have met on Indian soil in seven years. The LAC border dispute is unresolved. But direct flights have resumed, some Chinese investment restrictions have been relaxed and both governments have calculated that managed engagement serves their interests better than managed hostility.
A Modi-Xi conversation at Bharat Mandapam, conducted on mutual terms in the context of a summit that India has chaired and shaped — that is a different diplomatic frame from the stilted sideline conversations at Samarkand and Bali in the years after Galwan.
Those exchanges were managed awkwardness; this would be managed opportunity. The LAC remains what it has been since 2020 — a line of tension disguised as a line of control. But direct flights have resumed, Chinese investment restrictions have been partially relaxed and both governments have made the calculation, separately and carefully, that managed engagement now serves their national interests better than the managed hostility of the preceding five years.
A lasting solution to India-China disputes, particularly the border, has to begin somewhere, and every informed Indian who is honest about it will acknowledge that if there is one achievement that would stand above all others as Modi's legacy, this is it. Not the digital infrastructure, not Operation Sindoor, not the G20 or BRICS chairship but a durable, negotiated settlement of the frontier questions that have haunted bilateral relations since 1962 and that no Indian Prime Minister has managed to resolve. It would require give and take from both sides, that is the nature of every border settlement in history, but the vision Modi has spent twelve years articulating, of a Viksit Bharat by 2047, a self-reliant India at the centre of a multipolar world, cannot be fully realised in the shadow of an unresolved land dispute with the world's second-largest economy. A mutual Indo-China understanding on frontiers would free India's strategic imagination in ways that no other single diplomatic achievement could.
Russia has a stake in this too, and it is not a small one. Putin's relationship with both Modi and Xi is the most unusual triangular dynamic in contemporary geopolitics — a Russian President who depends on Chinese economic lifelines while the war in Ukraine continues, and who simultaneously values India's refusal to join Western pressure on Moscow, now sitting at a summit hosted by a man he has visited twice in under a year. An India-China rapprochement, even a partial one, reduces the friction that has forced Russia to manage the two relationships separately and carefully. Both Modi and Xi carry genuine personal rapport with Putin and it would be entirely consistent with the spirit of what India has built this chairship around if New Delhi's two most important bilateral conversations this week informed and reinforced each other, with Putin as the third point of a triangle that, if it holds, reshapes the diplomatic architecture of the entire Global South.
That frame is what Modi has spent twelve years building for the larger proposition that India has something to offer the world that neither the American nor the Chinese vision provides. A country that is the world's largest democracy and a founding BRICS member. A country that has its own nuclear doctrine and its own border disputes with China. A country that buys Russian oil and sells to American markets. A country that champions the Global South and hosts the world's most sophisticated digital public infrastructure. A country that cannot fit cleanly into any available category and has decided to treat that unclassifiability not as a vulnerability but as a strategic asset.