BRICS, explained.
India has invested heavily in the success of the BRICS summit (Kabir Jhangiani/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
India needs the summit to go smoothly – but so does China, for its own turn at the BRICS wheel next year.
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Delhi and Beijing need BRICS to work – not to trust each otherDelhi and Beijing need BRICS to work – not to trust each other
Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was in Beijing last week for Special Representatives (SR) talks (Opens in new window) with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi – the latest in a series of meetings between the two men and the last before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosts BRICS Summit in New Delhi in September. China’s President Xi Jinping’s attendance remains unconfirmed, but is increasingly expected.
Delhi’s investment in a smooth September summit gives Beijing a kind of leverage that no amount of talks has managed to trade away. As a litmus test for India’s own BRICS presidency, “stability” between the rival neighbours matters, given that Delhi has invested immense diplomatic capital in the summit’s success. Having Xi in the room on 12 September, marking his first visit to India in seven years (Opens in new window), is central to the narrative.
Back in June, Doval and Wang were in New Delhi for the BRICS National Security Advisers’ meeting (Opens in new window), where the atmospherics were notably warm by the standards of a relationship still recovering from the violence that erupted in Galwan in 2020 between troops along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) separating the two countries. This was in line with the diplomatic theatre (Opens in new window) of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Tianjin in 2025, which marked Modi’s first visit to China in seven years. Clearly that warmth has held, but the more interesting question is who needs it to hold more?
Modi and Xi meeting on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Tianjin, China, 2025 (MEAPhotoGallery/Flickr)
India has more riding on September going well than the optics around Doval’s visit let on. But the leverage runs in both directions. China assumes (Opens in new window) the BRICS presidency next year and will want a cooperative India. If Xi were to skip a summit hosted by the current chair despite no immediate border flare-ups, it may cost Beijing goodwill it will need in 2027. Delhi’s negotiating position on the run-up to September is not as weak as the “India needs this to work” framing suggests – Beijing needs it too, for its own future turn at the wheel. Modi’s visit to China last year for SCO marked the start of this diplomatic quid pro quo.
Nonetheless, bilateral balance remains precarious. Press releases after Doval’s talks with Wang in August show how each has quietly substituted its own nomenclature into a text that is nominally a joint, agreed consensus document. India’s version (Opens in new window) refers to the “Kailash-Manasarovar Yatra” in “Tibet”, while China’s refers (Opens in new window) to “Mount Gang Renpoche and Lake Mapam Yun Tso” in “Xizang”. The one sentence touching sovereignty-adjacent naming was rewritten by both sides before publishing, showing that cooperation on substance coexists with an unresolved framing fight over historical grievances that neither side will concede.
A developing threat to the bonhomie has already emerged via reports and allegations – some credible (Opens in new window), some debunked (Opens in new window) – of Chinese military activity in India’s Arunachal Pradesh, resurfacing through the past few months even as the Indian Army and state government have repeatedly pushed back on the more dramatic claims. The pattern is familiar: Chinese pressure at the periphery, this time in Taksing and Limeking circles (Opens in new window) of Upper Subansiri district in the Eastern Sector of the LAC, timed to moments when Delhi has the most to lose from friction given its investment in a successful BRICS summit. This gives Beijing leverage: it can expect Delhi to absorb irritants rather than let them derail the summit, and it can hold Xi’s attendance uncertain enough to keep Delhi accommodating.
India and China are investing in the same institution while imagining different futures for it.
Beijing would do well to remember irrespective of BRICS that Delhi’s position (Opens in new window) here has not moved: the border and the relationship have never been treated as separable, and nothing about September changes that calculus. The state of the border affairs will reflect on the state of larger bilateral ties.
Which is the point: in the India-China bilateral relationship, cooperation and unresolved sovereignty disputes coexist. BRICS, like the India-China SR talks, are institutional tools to retain dialogue, but are not to be viewed as proof they have settled what divides them.
Rather than being read as evidence of a genuine reset in the relationship, the more plausible explanation for the current warmth is narrower: both sides are managing differences and preserving what cooperation is achievable, careful not to signal any deeper convergence. The fact that this warmth is unfolding alongside other parallel tracks like the resuming (Opens in new window) business-to-business exchanges, the reopened Kailash Manasarovar Yatra (Opens in new window) and reinstated direct flights (Opens in new window) should not be taken to mean that these developments are necessarily connected.
With India and China frequently pursuing different objectives under the same institutional umbrella, Xi’s attendance at BRICS is important not as evidence of convergence, but for the opportunities it creates for India: a presidency to showcase, a platform from which to shape debates on development finance, and a vehicle for strengthening the broader Global South architecture. India and China are investing in the same institution while imagining different futures for it; what they describe as partnership is, in many respects, a way of managing a relationship in which trust remains limited.
For now, coordinated optics serve both capitals – particularly ahead of the summit and beyond so long as relative stability along the border holds.
About the author
Eerishika Pankaj
Eerishika Pankaj is the Director of New Delhi based think-tank, the Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA), which focuses on decoding domestic Chinese politics and its impact on Beijing’s foreign policymaking.
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