Xi Jinping gets red carpet at Brics summit amid thaw in India-China relations — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Xi Jinping received a red-carpet welcome in India for the BRICS summit, his first visit in seven years, as he was walked past an honour guard of Indian soldiers and traditional dancers
- Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had already been welcomed by Indian PM Narendra Modi, who is hosting one of the group's most closely watched summits since its inception
- The visit is the biggest step toward reconciliation since a deadly 2020 military clash along the disputed Himalayan border that killed 20 Indian and 4 Chinese soldiers, with flights and high-level contacts gradually being restored
- BRICS has expanded from its five original members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) to 11 — now including Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — accounting for half of the global population and rivalling the G7
- The summit is expected to produce only a generic joint declaration condemning unilateral war, with Reuters reporting it is unlikely to name any single country
- Internal fractures are visible: Iran was bombing fellow BRICS members Saudi Arabia and the UAE earlier this year, and Brics foreign ministers failed to agree on a joint statement when they met in Delhi in May
- China seeks to expand BRICS as a counterweight to the US under Donald Trump's tariff wars and retreat from multilateral institutions, while India takes a more cautious approach, positioning BRICS as a bridge between the West and the developing world
Why it matters: Modi is walking a tightrope at this summit: his 'strategic hedging' approach — engaging China, Russia, and Iran without alienating the West — looks increasingly out of sync with BRICS' anti-Western core. With 11 members who couldn't even agree on a joint statement in May, his vision of BRICS as a non-Western but not explicitly anti-Western bridge faces a direct credibility test.
Ask SkimNews
