Modi, Xi, Putin: The Biggest Challenges Before BRICS in Delhi

Modi, Xi and Putin, and the Fault Lines Beneath the BRICS Summit in Delhi

When Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin step onto the same stage at Bharat Mandapam, the photograph will carry further than anything written in the final communique. Xi's presence alone makes this summit unusual, since it is his first visit to India in roughly seven years, the two leaders not having met on Indian soil since their informal talks in 2019. And it comes at a raw moment for the world.

The war in Ukraine has ground into its fifth year, the contest between Washington and Beijing has become the organising rivalry of global politics, and West Asia is still smouldering after the strikes on Iran. India has seated inside the same hall both Iran and the United Arab Emirates, two members who stand on opposing sides of that conflict. A picture of Modi, Xi and Putin together will be read as a show of solidarity. The tensions running beneath it tell a different and more honest story, and those tensions are what the 18th BRICS summit is really about.

BRICS was a label before it was an institution, an acronym an economist coined in 2001 to flag the emerging economies worth watching. Brazil, Russia, India and China held their first leaders' summit only in 2009, and South Africa joined a year later to round out the original five. For more than a decade the club stayed exactly that size. Then it swung its doors open. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE entered as full members at the start of 2024, Indonesia followed in 2025, and Saudi Arabia was invited as well, taking the group to eleven members on paper.

The bloc now reaches across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Gulf, and its members together account for close to 40 percent of the global economy and nearly half the world's population. Saturday's session was held behind closed doors, with the leaders talking about reforming global governance and defending multilateralism.

On Sunday the room expands to take in partner states and invited guests before the leaders issue the New Delhi Declaration. That text matters more than any handshake, because in a bloc this large and this fractured, the language eleven governments can actually agree to put their names to is the truest measure of what BRICS has become, and of the limits it keeps running into.

Also Read:BRICS In Delhi: Make Or Break For India, Caught Between Two Boats

Why

Modi, Xi and Putin, and the Fault Lines Beneath the BRICS Summit in Delhi

When Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin step onto the same stage at Bharat Mandapam, the photograph will carry further than anything written in the final communique. Xi's presence alone makes this summit unusual, since it is his first visit to India in roughly seven years, the two leaders not having met on Indian soil since their informal talks in 2019. And it comes at a raw moment for the world.

The war in Ukraine has ground into its fifth year, the contest between Washington and Beijing has become the organising rivalry of global politics, and West Asia is still smouldering after the strikes on Iran. India has seated inside the same hall both Iran and the United Arab Emirates, two members who stand on opposing sides of that conflict. A picture of Modi, Xi and Putin together will be read as a show of solidarity. The tensions running beneath it tell a different and more honest story, and those tensions are what the 18th BRICS summit is really about.

BRICS was a label before it was an institution, an acronym an economist coined in 2001 to flag the emerging economies worth watching. Brazil, Russia, India and China held their first leaders' summit only in 2009, and South Africa joined a year later to round out the original five. For more than a decade the club stayed exactly that size. Then it swung its doors open. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE entered as full members at the start of 2024, Indonesia followed in 2025, and Saudi Arabia was invited as well, taking the group to eleven members on paper.

The bloc now reaches across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Gulf, and its members together account for close to 40 percent of the global economy and nearly half the world's population. Saturday's session was held behind closed doors, with the leaders talking about reforming global governance and defending multilateralism.

On Sunday the room expands to take in partner states and invited guests before the leaders issue the New Delhi Declaration. That text matters more than any handshake, because in a bloc this large and this fractured, the language eleven governments can actually agree to put their names to is the truest measure of what BRICS has become, and of the limits it keeps running into.

Also Read:  BRICS In Delhi: Make Or Break For India, Caught Between Two Boats

Why Washington Is Watching Modi, Xi and Putin So Closely

No capital is studying this summit more closely than Washington. India is in the middle of trade negotiations with the United States, and the relationship with the second Trump administration has been anything but smooth, snagging repeatedly on tariffs and hard bargaining. That friction is exactly why New Delhi has been widening its options elsewhere.

A couple of years ago, Indian officials were said to be uneasy about belonging to China-dominated groupings like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even as the country leaned towards the West. Yet at the SCO summit in Bishkek at the start of September, Modi stood alongside Xi and Putin and put India's signature to the Bishkek Declaration, which condemned the military strikes on Iranian territory and pushed back against Western sanctions. That was a notable turn, given that India had earlier declined to join in condemning those strikes. But New Delhi also knows the outer edge of this game. Lean too far towards Moscow and Beijing, and it risks handing Washington a reason to retaliate. Every gesture at a BRICS table is therefore calibrated.

The word for what India is doing is hedging, and it is the key to reading its foreign policy right now. Strategic hedging, put simply, is the refusal to lock into any single great-power camp. Rather than bet the house on one partner, a hedging state cultivates ties with several powers at once, including rivals, so that it always keeps its choices open and never becomes hostage to the goodwill of one capital.

For India this is less a doctrine than a daily tightrope walk. It buys discounted Russian oil while deepening defence and technology ties with the United States, courts a cautious thaw with China while quietly guarding its northern border, and speaks for the Global South without letting any partner conscript it into a bloc. The balance is delicate, and a single misstep in either direction carries a real cost.

What India wants out of Delhi is to bank as much as it can without setting Washington against it, and it is trying to do that in a room where Modi, Xi and Putin each arrive with a different wish list. Putin wants the summit to broadcast that Russia is neither isolated nor cornered, and he wants BRICS to keep expanding trade in national currencies so that sanctions bite less; India, for its part, has fixed a target of 100 billion dollars in annual trade with Russia by 2030, floated on cheap oil. Xi wants to press the case for loosening the world's dependence on the dollar and to cast China as the natural leader of the developing world, all of it staged just before his own meeting with Donald Trump later this month.

Modi wants something quieter and harder to photograph: a substantive chairship with real deliverables in agriculture, digital public infrastructure and health, a louder voice for the Global South, and a summit that advances the India-China reset without being swallowed by it. 

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Dedollarisation, the Fault Line India Would Rather Manage Than Fight

Nothing exposes those competing agendas like the argument over the dollar. India's dilemma is genuine. Russia, cut off from Western financial plumbing, and China, eager to build an alternative to it, both have strong reasons to chip away at dollar dominance, and the two now settle the overwhelming share of their bilateral trade in roubles and yuan. 

Trump has made his own position brutally clear, threatening tariffs of up to 100 percent on any BRICS country that moves to sideline the dollar. India has read that threat and softened its language accordingly, framing its own efforts as local-currency settlement and cheaper cross-border payments rather than any assault on the greenback. But several of the leaders now in Delhi carry a far heavier grievance against the United States than India does. Russia and Iran both live under sweeping American sanctions, and for them building payment channels outside the dollar is not a talking point but a matter of economic survival. That asymmetry, between members who want to manage the dollar and members who want to escape it, runs straight through the summit.

The most ambitious version of that project, a single BRICS currency to rival the dollar, has quietly been shelved, and the politics of why are instructive. India has been the most consistent sceptic, its ministers saying flatly that the country does not support a shared currency and that the very idea of one bound together with China is unworkable given the trust deficit between them. Even Brazil, whose president once mused aloud about a common trading currency, has since disowned any such proposal, its officials insisting there is nothing on the table.

What survives is far more modest: local-currency trade, linked payment systems and experiments with digital currencies, gathered under initiatives such as BRICS Pay. The reserve data explains the retreat. The dollar still makes up close to 58 percent of global reserves and features in the vast majority of foreign-exchange transactions, while the Chinese renminbi sits below 2 percent. Dedollarisation, in other words, is real as plumbing and mostly rhetoric as revolution.

Can Eleven Rival Nations Agree? The Real Test of Multilateralism

A photograph of Modi, Xi and Putin can make BRICS look like a single body with a single will. The harder question is whether genuine multilateralism is even possible among eleven governments this mismatched. India and China are wary neighbours whose trade relationship is lopsided, with India running a deficit of more than 112 billion dollars and an unresolved border still between them.

Iran and the UAE sit on opposite sides of the West Asia conflict. Egypt, Ethiopia and others bring their own regional quarrels and dependencies to the table. Getting all of them to sign a declaration that says something meaningful, rather than a string of pleasant generalities, is an enormous undertaking, and the more members the bloc admits, the thinner the consensus it can reach. A watered-down communique would not be an accident of drafting. It would be the truest possible portrait of the group.

The sharpest test will be the final communique's treatment of the war. Will the New Delhi Declaration say anything at all about the American and Israeli action against Iran, or will it look away? Iran, a full member now, will press for pointed language, and its president is in Delhi to make that case. The SCO went there only days ago, its Bishkek Declaration condemning the strikes on Iranian soil and calling for a diplomatic settlement. If BRICS, with the UAE inside the tent, cannot bring itself to say something comparable, Tehran will feel let down and India will be accused by many of hiding behind its balancing act instead of taking a stand. If it says too much, it angers a Washington that India cannot afford to alienate. There is no comfortable landing here, and the drafting of a single paragraph on West Asia may prove the hardest diplomacy of the weekend.

Also Read:  Iran Demands Oil Tariffs in Chinese Yuan, Threatening Dollar Dominance

Trump, for his part, can afford a certain calm, because he understands the arithmetic. For as long as the members of BRICS carry conflicting interests and chase their own national advantage, the bloc cannot cohere into a genuine challenge to American power. The point is visible even among the four founding economies. When a crisis moves energy markets, Russia and Brazil, both major exporters, want prices high, while China and India, both enormous importers, want them low. The same fault line repeats across the wider group on issue after issue. A coalition whose members profit from opposite outcomes can protest Western dominance in unison, but it struggles to act in unison, and that is the difference between a lobby and a power.

The bloc's own guest list deepens the problem. Several of its members are close partners, and in some cases near-allies, of the very country BRICS is meant to counterbalance. The UAE holds deep security and commercial ties with Washington, Indonesia guards its relationships across the Western world, and Saudi Arabia, though listed among the members, has still not formally completed its accession, precisely because it does not want to jeopardise its dealings with the United States. These are not states with any appetite to turn BRICS into an anti-Western front. Their presence works as a built-in brake, ensuring the group's rhetoric of defiance rarely hardens into anything that would force them to pick a side.

Underneath all of it sits the grievance that gives BRICS its real reason to exist: the architecture of global power. The United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were built in another century and still carry its imprint, with the United States and its allies holding outsized sway over institutions that govern the whole world. From the vantage point of the Global South, those bodies too often behave as instruments of Western preference rather than neutral referees. This is the one ambition on which BRICS members broadly agree, a demand for a fairer distribution of voice and votes, and it is why the bloc keeps building its own scaffolding, from the New Development Bank to alternative payment rails. A BRICS that could speak with one voice on reform would be a genuine check on that imbalance. The bloc's misfortune is that the same internal divisions that dull its other ambitions also blunt this one.

What Twenty Years of BRICS Should Be Measured Against, for Modi, Xi and Putin

As BRICS marks two decades since its foundation, the temptation is to grade it against the wrong exam. The question is not whether the club fronted in Delhi by Modi, Xi and Putin has become a wrecking ball aimed at the United States, because it has not, and on the evidence of this summit it will not. The fairer test is subtler and more revealing. Can eleven nations that disagree on trade, on currency, on war and on the shape of the world order still keep showing up at the same table, still find the handful of things they can say together, and in doing so make the exercise of Western dominance a little more effortful and a little less automatic?

By that measure the summit need not deliver a thunderclap to matter. If BRICS can hold itself together and chip, patiently, at the assumption that the rules of the world are Washington's alone to write, that is not nothing. It may, in the end, be the most this magnificently contradictory bloc was ever going to be.