Beijing and Delhi compete to lead bloc amid US global pullback
Xi Jinping stepped off the plane in New Delhi and was walked past an honour guard of Indian soldiers and traditional dancers in colourful dresses. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had already arrived and been welcomed by Modi, who is hosting one of the bloc’s most closely watched gatherings since its inception.
The visit is Xi’s first to India in seven years and is seen as the most significant step toward reconciliation since the 2020 military clash along the disputed Himalayan border that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers. Ties between the nuclear-armed Asian giants have been warming recently, with flights and high-level contacts gradually being restored. China’s foreign ministry said Friday that Beijing was “willing” to work with India to properly manage differences and be “good neighbours and friends.”
The BRICS grouping — named after its five earliest members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — was conceived in 2009 as a counterweight to Western dominance. It has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The 11-member bloc now rivals the G7 forum of advanced economies and accounts for half the global population.
This year’s gathering comes against a backdrop of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and rising US-China tensions, testing the bloc’s ability to find common ground. Reuters reported Saturday that India’s summit would produce a generic joint declaration condemning unilateral war but would not name any single country. BRICS foreign ministers failed to agree on a joint statement when they met in Delhi in May.
Jiang Shixue, vice-president of the expert committee of the China thinktank Council for BRICs Cooperation, said the 11 members “cannot speak with one voice on many issues.” “The only solution is to continuously strengthen political consensus,” he told the South China Morning Post.
Beijing and New Delhi have diverging visions for the group. China has sought to expand BRICS power as a counterweight to the United States under President Donald Trump’s leadership, which has launched global tariff and trade wars and retreated from multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. India has taken a more cautious approach, seeing BRICS as a bridge between the West and the developing world.
Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior research fellow for South Asia at the Asia-Pacific programme at Chatham House, said this week that Delhi had found it hard to maintain its policy of “strategic hedging” during a disruptive US presidency. “India’s position can appear out of sync in a forum whose membership includes countries with more overtly anti-western agendas, including China, Russia and Iran. And two other Brics countries, South Africa and Brazil, have suffered high-profile diplomatic disputes with the US,” he wrote. “The challenge for Delhi is that it wishes to promote this worldview in a way that is non-western but not explicitly anti-western.”
The bloc’s expansion has also created new fractures. Iran was bombing Saudi Arabia and the UAE earlier this year, and the addition of members with conflicting interests has deepened the challenges of reaching consensus.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.