At a BRICS summit held this week, China and India brought competing visions of the bloc's purpose into quiet but consequential collision. Beijing seeks to transform the organization into a strategic counterweight to American global dominance, while New Delhi insists on preserving the deliberate ambiguity that allows it to engage all powers without binding itself to any. The disagreement is less a diplomatic crisis than a philosophical one — a question of whether a coalition born of shared economic weight can survive the gravity of diverging strategic destinies.