Xi arrives in India for BRICS summit amid geopolitical tensions

Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in New Delhi on Saturday for the 18th BRICS summit, marking his first visit to India in seven years and the most visible sign yet of a tentative warming between two nuclear-armed nations whose relationship had fractured badly. He arrived at the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accompanied by Foreign Minister Wang Yi and senior Communist Party official Cai Qi. The summit would bring together the leaders of Russia and Iran as well—eleven nations in total, all gathered to navigate a world fractured by active wars, energy crises, and the slow erosion of Western economic dominance.

The timing was heavy with symbolism and constraint. Six years earlier, in 2020, Chinese and Indian soldiers had clashed along their disputed border in Tibet, a high-altitude frontier stretching roughly 2,175 miles that neither side has ever fully resolved. Since then, the two countries had inched toward each other through small gestures: restored flights, renewed visa access, careful diplomatic contacts. Yet the underlying territorial dispute remained unresolved, and both nations maintained substantial military forces along the border, a fact that underscored how fragile the thaw actually was. Pradeep Taneja, a China-India specialist at the University of Melbourne, captured the contradiction plainly: you cannot simultaneously build up your forces on a contested border and claim you want to deepen economic and people-to-people ties. The two leaders were hoping for what officials called an "early and substantial harvest" on the border question—language that suggested modest expectations rather than breakthrough.

Deep mistrust persisted beneath the diplomatic choreography. A widening trade deficit, strategic rivalry in Asia, and the unresolved territorial question all complicated the relationship. In New Delhi on Friday, dozens of Tibetan exiles, including their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, had protested Xi's arrival, holding placards against the visit. Beijing had responded by saying it was "ready to work with India" through strengthened communication and cooperation, a formulation that acknowledged tensions without naming them directly.

The summit itself was shadowed by conflicts that no single bloc could resolve. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East dominated the agenda, along with the energy security crisis those wars had created. Russia's Vladimir Putin had already arrived in the capital and held talks with Modi on Friday, reaffirming what both countries called their "special" relationship. Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian had also arrived, and Modi used their meeting to emphasize the importance of protecting freedom of navigation and the safety of ships' crews—a pointed reference to the dangers posed by the U.S.-Iran conflict in the Persian Gulf.

India's own position illustrated the bind that BRICS faced. The country had navigated the energy crisis partly by turning to Russia for oil and gas, a move that required careful balancing. Washington and other Western capitals had pressured India to distance itself from Moscow over the Ukraine invasion, yet India's energy needs and its strategic partnership with Russia pulled in the opposite direction. BRICS itself, created in 2009 as a forum for major emerging economies seeking greater influence in institutions dominated by the West, now faced a test of whether it could forge unified positions on these crises or whether competing national interests would fracture it from within.

Xi and Modi were scheduled to hold face-to-face talks later on Saturday, according to India's Ministry of External Affairs. What emerged from those conversations—whether the two sides could find common ground on their border dispute, or whether they would simply agree to manage their differences—would signal whether BRICS could function as a genuine counterweight to Western influence or remained, fundamentally, a collection of nations with diverging priorities.