Xi's Delhi visit signals India-China thaw as Brics seeks unity amid global tensions

Xi Jinping stepped onto the tarmac in Delhi on Saturday to an honour guard of Indian soldiers and dancers in traditional dress—a carefully choreographed moment that said more than any statement could. The Chinese president's arrival marked his first return to India in seven years, and the ceremonial welcome was unmistakable in its message: two nuclear-armed nations that had bloodied each other were attempting, at least in public, to move past it.

Six years earlier, in 2020, Indian and Chinese troops had clashed along their disputed Himalayan border. Twenty Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers died in that encounter—a shock that had frozen relations between the world's two most populous countries. Since then, the relationship had thawed incrementally: flights resumed, high-level contacts were restored, and now Xi was here for the Brics summit, one of the bloc's most closely watched gatherings since its founding.

The summit itself was a study in managed contradiction. Brics—originally an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—had grown since 2009 into something larger and more fractious. Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates had joined, expanding the group to eleven members representing roughly half the world's population. It was conceived as a counterweight to Western dominance, a forum where emerging economies could find common cause. But the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, along with escalating US-China tensions, had tested whether the bloc could actually agree on anything.

When Brics foreign ministers had met in Delhi in May, they could not produce a joint statement. The fractures were real: Iran had bombed Saudi Arabia and the UAE earlier in the year. The group's internal contradictions were too sharp. Yet on Saturday, the eleven members managed something: they unanimously agreed on wording for a joint declaration. The "New Delhi declaration" called for peaceful resolution of disputes through dialogue and diplomacy, and urged "maximum restraint" in the Middle East—though the language was carefully constructed to avoid naming any member country actively involved in conflict.

Behind the ceremonial unity, however, lay a deeper disagreement about what Brics should be. China, under Xi's leadership, had pushed the bloc to function as an explicit counterweight to American power, particularly under Donald Trump's presidency, which had launched trade wars and withdrawn from multilateral institutions. India, by contrast, saw Brics differently: as a bridge between the West and the developing world, not as an anti-Western alliance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, hosting the summit, had opened Saturday's talks by saying Brics was "not against anyone."

This tension reflected India's precarious position within the group. Delhi wanted to promote a non-Western worldview without being explicitly anti-Western—a balance that had grown harder to maintain as the US presidency became more disruptive. India's Brics partners included countries with overtly anti-Western agendas: China, Russia, and Iran. South Africa and Brazil had both suffered high-profile diplomatic disputes with Washington. India, meanwhile, maintained its own complex relationship with the United States, one that did not fit neatly into Brics's emerging identity.

Xi's red-carpet welcome was thus a gesture toward reconciliation with India, but it was also a move in a larger game. The two countries were competing quietly to shape what Brics would become at a moment when American global dominance appeared shakier than it had in decades. The question hanging over the summit was whether the bloc could actually speak with one voice on the issues that mattered most—or whether, as one Chinese expert put it, the only path forward was to "continuously strengthen political consensus" among members who could not agree on much of anything.