Straight Talk | BRICS Summit: With Xi And Putin In Delhi, India Takes Global Centre Stage

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

What's on display in Delhi this week is confidence built on numbers — growth, market size, defence capability — not just rhetoric

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Two men Washington has spent years trying to isolate will stand next to Narendra Modi in Delhi this weekend.

Xi Jinping’s trip is his first to India since Mamallapuram in 2019, a visit separated from this one by Galwan, a military standoff and years of frozen diplomacy. Putin’s presence carries its own weight, arriving a day early for a bilateral before the summit opens at Bharat Mandapam on September 12. Neither visit required India to explain itself to anyone.

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That last sentence is really the whole story, and it’s worth stating plainly before getting into the details. This week, India is not choosing a side, hedging between blocs or performing some delicate diplomatic balancing act for an audience back home or abroad. It is India doing what a country with genuine leverage does — negotiating a fighter jet deal with Moscow, managing a live border dispute with Beijing while quietly making progress on it, and closing out a trade framework with Washington and the larger West, all inside the same stretch of months, without treating any of it as a contradiction that needs explaining. The message to the rest of the world, intentional or not, is that the era of India needing anyone’s permission for its foreign policy choices is over.

What’s on display in Delhi this week is confidence built on numbers — growth, market size, defence capability — not just rhetoric.

Let’s start with what’s actually changed on the China track, because it is easy to overstate and equally easy to dismiss. The October 2024 disengagement agreement along the Line of Actual Control restored patrolling arrangements in Depsang and Demchok. It did not touch the underlying territorial claims, and it left older patrolling moratoriums in more sensitive buffer zones — Galwan, the Pangong Tso banks, Gogra-Hotsprings — unresolved. What has moved further, and more concretely, is the diplomatic track behind it.

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