BRICS in New Delhi: The Room Where Rivals Must Sit
In New Delhi, the geometry of global power is doing something interesting.
BRICS in New Delhi: The Room Where Rivals Must Sit
In New Delhi, the geometry of global power is doing something interesting. Xi Jinping has landed on Indian soil — the first time in five years that China's president has stood in a country with which his own nation shares a disputed, occasionally deadly border. The handshakes will be measured. The photographs will be studied. And beneath the formal agenda of the BRICS summit, something quieter and more consequential is taking shape: a conversation about what the world looks like when the old certainties no longer hold.
India knows how to host this particular tension. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent years constructing a foreign policy that refuses to be cornered — buying energy from one bloc, selling services to another, sitting at tables that are supposed to be incompatible. New Delhi is, in that sense, the perfect city for a summit that is itself an exercise in strategic ambiguity.
The BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and its expanding roster of newer members — has never been a alliance. It is more like a waiting room: nations who share a grievance with the existing order but cannot always agree on what should replace it. What makes this gathering different is the sheer weight of concurrent crises pressing against the walls. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have fractured the energy markets that several member states depend on. The dollar's dominance, a perennial BRICS grievance, has become more politically charged as Washington deploys sanctions with increasing frequency. Canada's buy-local movement — a quiet counter-current to American tariff pressure — signals that even Washington's closest neighbours are beginning to hedge.
What Xi and Modi say to each other in the margins of the formal sessions may matter more than any communiqué. Their two countries hold between them nearly three billion people, the world's fastest-growing major economies, and a border dispute that has twice turned lethal in living memory. If they find a working language — not friendship, but functional coexistence — it reorders something. Not everything, but something.
The summit will produce a document. The document will use words like "multipolarity" and "reform of global institutions." Diplomats will parse its paragraphs for signals. But the real story is simpler and older: two men who lead rival civilisations are in the same room, in a city that has seen enough empires come and go to know that the most dangerous moment is never the confrontation — it is the miscalculation that precedes it.
From Valletta, watching the satellite feeds, the ancient stones offer their usual indifference. The Mediterranean has always been the edge of someone else's empire. Today, the centre of gravity is somewhere over the Indian subcontinent, and the question is whether the rivals sitting across from each other are negotiating a new order — or simply buying time.
