Xi Gets Red Carpet at BRICS Summit as India-China Thaw — SkimNews
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- Xi Jinping received a red-carpet welcome in India with an honour guard and traditional dancers, marking his first visit in seven years and the biggest step toward reconciliation since a 2020 Himalayan border clash that killed 20 Indian and 4 Chinese soldiers.
- The 11-member BRICS bloc unanimously adopted the "New Delhi declaration," calling for peaceful resolution of disputes and "maximum restraint" in the Middle East — though worded to avoid calling out member states actively involved in conflicts.
- China seeks to expand BRICS as a counterweight to the US under Trump's tariff wars and retreat from multilateral institutions, while India positions the bloc as a bridge between the West and the developing world — a tension Chatham House's Chietigj Bajpaee says leaves Delhi's stance "out of sync" with overtly anti-western members.
- Iran was bombing fellow BRICS members Saudi Arabia and the UAE earlier this year, and the group's foreign ministers failed to agree on a joint statement when they met in Delhi in May — fractures the South China Morning Post's Jiang Shixue acknowledged when he said the 11 members "cannot speak with one voice on many issues."
- BRICS, founded in 2009 and now expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, accounts for half the global population and rivals the G7.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian were also welcomed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who opened talks by declaring BRICS was "not against anyone."
Why it matters: The unanimous New Delhi declaration shows BRICS can paper over rivalries for a photo op, but the carefully neutral wording — which avoids naming any member involved in active conflicts — exposes the bloc's inability to enforce common positions. India now faces the harder task of steering a non-Western but not explicitly anti-Western agenda while sharing a table with China, Russia, and Iran, each pursuing more openly adversarial stances toward the US.
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