Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to occupy the spotlight in the 18th BRICS summit being organised in New Delhi over two days—September 12 and 13.
Beijing’s foreign ministry officially confirmed on Thursday, September 10, that Xi Jinping will travel to India to participate in the BRICS summit, marking his return to Indian soil after an absence stretching back nearly seven years. The trip carries weight beyond routine diplomatic attendance; it arrives at a moment when both nations are cautiously testing whether years of frozen ties can be thawed.
The one-on-one sideline conversation expected between Modi and Jinping is already the subject of animated conversations across India, creating more speculation than perhaps any other single moment or aspect of the gathering.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian are also slated to make the trip to New Delhi for the summit, adding further geopolitical heft to proceedings that unfold against a tense global backdrop, with conflicts still simmering across both the Middle East and Europe.
Notably, this marks India’s first turn hosting the summit in half a decade — a five-year interval that itself speaks to how substantially the bloc’s composition and dynamics have evolved since New Delhi last held the reins.
The summit’s timing matters, too. It falls roughly a year after Modi and Jinping held an informal sideline conversation at the Kazan BRICS gathering in October 2024, which many observers now regard as the turning point that set the current thaw in motion.
New Delhi serves as host city this year. The venue itself is symbolically loaded — Jinping’s last footprint on Indian ground was in Mamallapuram in 2019, a visit that predates the bitter military standoff that followed.
The backdrop to this latest visit is impossible to separate from the Galwan Valley confrontation of June 2020, a clash that claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese personnel, and which froze bilateral relations for the better part of four years. What makes Xi’s upcoming trip notable is not merely his attendance at a multilateral forum but what it signals about the trajectory of a relationship that spent half a decade in deep freeze.
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“Diplomatic channels have been quietly working to unwind that standoff since late 2024, when both sides reached an understanding on troop disengagement at Depsang and Demchok — two of the last remaining friction points along the Line of Actual Control,” said sources close to a top bureaucrat familiar with the BRICS summit plans.
The path toward this moment has been incremental rather than dramatic. Following the Depsang-Demchok breakthrough, Modi and Jinping’s Kazan meeting gave political cover to revive dormant mechanisms meant to address the boundary dispute. Since then, tangible steps have followed: direct flight connections between the two countries have resumed, and the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra — a pilgrimage route long suspended amid the tension — has been reinstated. Military and diplomatic officials have kept parallel tracks open, with the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination reviewing border conditions as recently as May and reporting measured progress.
Momentum picked up further last month, when India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval and Chinese diplomat-politician Wang Yi, in their capacity as Special Representatives on the boundary question from both nations, hammered out an eight-point framework. That agreement expanded the number of military-to-military contact points, established new hotline arrangements between field commanders, and reopened three trading posts along the frontier that had been shuttered for years.
Just days ago, on September 6, the Chinese and Indian militaries convened their first corps commander-level dialogue in the eastern sector, in Arunachal Pradesh — a signal that de-escalation efforts now extend beyond the western Himalayan flashpoints that dominated earlier headlines.
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Even so, New Delhi has been careful not to let the diplomatic optics run ahead of substance. India’s foreign affairs minister S. Jaishankar, in his exchange with Wang in July, made clear that genuine normalisation hinges on tangible, sustained calm at the border rather than symbolic gestures alone — a position that continues to shape how India frames the relationship publicly.
Against this backdrop, the anticipated Modi-Xi sideline meeting in New Delhi is likely to draw more scrutiny than the summit’s broader agenda, which will otherwise cover economic cooperation, institutional reform within global bodies, and coordination among member states on international conflicts. For India, hosting duties offer a rare dual opportunity — to steer the BRICS conversation on its own terms while simultaneously gauging, face to face, how far Beijing is genuinely willing to go in resolving a dispute that has defined the relationship for half a decade.
