The Summit India Cannot Chair: Xi Jinping’s New Delhi Visit and the Diplomatic Geometry of BRICS+

1. The Xi-Modi Reset

Xi Jinping’s last visit to India was the Mamallapuram informal summit in October 2019, a coastal retreat in Tamil Nadu that both leaders framed as a civilizational dialogue between Asia’s two great powers. Seven months later, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh, killing twenty Indian soldiers in the bloodiest Sino-Indian border incident since 1975. The bilateral relationship entered a freeze from which it is only now formally emerging. [Established — Reuters, “China’s Xi expected to visit India for BRICS summit,” 24 August 2026; Wikipedia, “Galwan Valley skirmish,” confirming June 2020 date and casualties.]

The New Delhi visit is therefore not merely a BRICS formality. It is the diplomatic rehabilitation of a bilateral relationship that has spent six years managed at the level of military disengagement protocols rather than head-of-state summitry. For Modi, hosting Xi is an assertion that India’s foreign policy autonomy extends to maintaining strategic dialogue with China simultaneously with deepened ties to the United States and the Quad. For Xi, the visit is an opportunity to stabilise India’s positioning at a moment when Washington has been pressing New Delhi toward greater alignment on technology controls and supply chain decoupling. [Assessed with high confidence — both leaders’ strategic motivations are inferable from the established diplomatic record.]

The bilateral signalling matters more than the BRICS communiqué. Summit meetings of this size produce documents by committee; what the two leaders say privately, and what they publish jointly in a bilateral statement separate from the BRICS declaration, will be the operative diplomatic text.

2. The Architecture Problem

BRICS was founded in 2009 as a grouping of five emerging-market economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — with broadly shared interests in reforming global financial governance. The 2024 expansion to BRICS+ added Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina, tripling the membership and transforming the group from a loosely coherent bloc into a geopolitically contradictory one. [Established — Embassy of India, Riyadh, “18th BRICS Summit, 12–13 September, New Delhi”; Brut Media, “BRICS Summit 2026 in Delhi: Why The World Will Be Watching India in September.”]

The contradiction is structural. Iran is a BRICS+ member. So is Saudi Arabia, whose oil infrastructure has been struck by Iranian-allied Houthi forces. So is the UAE, whose territorial waters were violated by an IRGC drone intercepted on 1 September 2026. [Established — The Leadsman — Bosun Desk, “The Back-Channel Paradox,” Sounding No. 30, 2 September 2026; UAE drone interception corroborated by FXStreet, 1 September 2026.] BRICS+ is being asked to convene as a solidarity bloc at a moment when three of its members are in an active military and diplomatic conflict with one another.

India’s presidency theme — resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability — was chosen before the Hormuz crisis reached its current severity. The published agenda items cover trade facilitation, digital infrastructure, climate finance, and health security. [Established — businesstoday.in, “BRICS Summit 2026: Central government offices in Delhi to remain closed on September 11,” 3 September 2026.] What the agenda does not cover is the disruption to global oil supply that is simultaneously the primary inflation driver for five of the bloc’s member economies and the product of actions by one of its newest members.

3. What India Wants

India’s interest in this summit is calibrated with considerable precision. New Delhi wants three things from the New Delhi meeting: (1) to rehabilitate the Modi-Xi bilateral without formally abandoning India’s Western alignment; (2) to demonstrate India’s capacity as a multilateral convenor without being blamed for the meeting’s structural impossibilities; and (3) to use the BRICS chairship as leverage in the Trump-Xi September 24 bilateral, signalling to Washington that India has diplomatic options it will not foreclose unilaterally. [Assessed with moderate confidence — India’s strategic posture is well documented; the specific priority ordering is analytical inference.]

The Hormuz silence in the agenda is not an oversight. It is a deliberate choice, and it reveals the limits of India’s convening position. New Delhi imports approximately 85% of its crude oil; a significant portion transits the Strait of Hormuz or Gulf waters under Iranian threat. India has an acute material interest in Hormuz resolution. It also has Iran as a BRICS+ partner and Saudi Arabia and the UAE as separate partners. Any attempt to table the crisis would require India to either criticise Iran in front of its own membership or endorse Saudi and UAE positions — neither of which serves India’s interest in non-alignment. The agenda’s silence is a structural solution to an unsolvable problem. [Assessed with high confidence — India’s oil import exposure and strategic positioning are matters of public record.]

4. What China Wants

Xi’s interest in the New Delhi visit operates on a different register. China has been notably ambiguous about the Hormuz crisis: it has not publicly endorsed Iran’s position, has not joined Western condemnations, and has not invoked its bilateral oil relationship with Tehran to seek diplomatic resolution. [Assessed with high confidence — China’s public position on Hormuz has been characterised as deliberate abstention by Reuters, Bloomberg, and FT throughout August 2026.] China’s ambiguity is not confusion. It is a carefully maintained option: Beijing retains influence with Tehran, retains trade relationships with Gulf producers, and retains its posture as the US’s structural alternative without paying the diplomatic price of choosing a side.

The New Delhi visit allows Xi to demonstrate that China’s foreign policy relationships are broader than Washington’s framing allows. Arriving in India six days before the Federal Reserve decides on interest rates — a decision shaped partly by Hormuz-driven energy inflation — and eighteen days before meeting Trump bilaterally, Xi is positioning China as the actor that has not destabilised the global economy, while the US has committed naval forces to a strait war that is raising prices for every economy present in the room.

Whether that positioning survives contact with New Delhi’s more hawkish security establishment — which has not forgotten Galwan — is the operative question of the bilateral track that runs alongside the summit agenda. [Assessed with moderate confidence — India’s security establishment’s wariness of China is well documented; its effect on bilateral outcomes is uncertain.]

5. What the Incoherence Reveals

The BRICS+ architecture was designed on the premise that the global South had sufficient common interest — in financial reform, in multipolarity, in US dollar de-emphasis — to sustain a cohesive alternative diplomatic bloc. The Hormuz crisis has revealed the limit of that premise in a single data point: a bloc that cannot table the defining economic disruption of the year, because tabling it would require it to adjudicate a conflict between its own members, is not an alternative international order. It is a forum that has expanded past its coherence threshold.

That does not make BRICS+ irrelevant. The bilateral relationships its meetings generate — the Modi-Xi rehabilitation, the Gulf state engagement with China, the Russia-India energy relationships maintained outside Western sanction architecture — are real and consequential. But they are bilateral outcomes laundered through a multilateral format, not the product of BRICS+ functioning as a bloc. The gap between the format and the function is what the New Delhi summit will demonstrate, one way or another.

Bottom line: Xi arrives in New Delhi to rehabilitate a relationship that the Galwan Valley nearly ended. India hosts to demonstrate strategic autonomy it needs Washington to notice. The BRICS+ grouping convenes around an agenda designed to avoid its defining failure. The communiqué will be long. The Hormuz section will be absent. The bilateral meeting between Modi and Xi will do more diplomatic work than the summit table. What the New Delhi summit actually tests is whether a multilateral format designed for shared grievance can survive the point at which its members’ specific interests begin to conflict with one another. The answer, as of September 12, appears to be: only by not asking the question.