A year after their much-publicised huddle at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, the three are meeting in a BRICS that is larger, more politically divided and more openly exposed to pressure from the US. Xi is making his first visit to India in seven years, Putin is attending his first summit outside Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, and Modi is trying to hold together relationships with both while retaining close ties with the West too.
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The photograph will certainly carry weight and sound alarm in the West but whether the handshake changes anything beyond the optics depends on what the 11-member grouping can actually deliver.
A bigger BRICS, and a harder one to manage
BRICS has travelled a long way from the four-country acronym coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001. Brazil, Russia, India and China became a political grouping in 2009, South Africa joined in 2011, and Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE entered in 2024. Indonesia joined in 2025. Saudi Arabia is a special case: BRICS documents list it among the expanded members, but Riyadh has repeatedly stopped short of formally confirming accession. Saudi Arabia nevertheless participates in BRICS meetings, including this year’s foreign ministers’ process.
ALSO READ | BRICS has the oil jackpot. Now comes the hard partThe numbers are indeed formidable. The expanded grouping is at roughly 49% of the world’s population, 39% of global GDP and 23% of international trade. Its membership now stretches from major Asian manufacturing powers to Gulf energy exporters, African economies and Iran.
But this immense breadth is also BRICS’ weakness. BRICS has no treaty, permanent secretariat or common budget, and decisions are reached by consensus. At the May 2026 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi, members failed to issue a joint statement, with differences between Iran and the UAE over the conflict involving Iran among the obstacles. The problem was unusually stark. Two countries inside a group trying to speak for the Global South were themselves on opposite sides of a live regional confrontation.
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Expansion has therefore increased BRICS’ reach faster than it has increased its capacity to act.
The three powers are closer, but for different reasons
Russia has the strongest incentive to push BRICS towards a more functional alternative to Western economic structures. Sanctions have made Moscow more dependent on non-Western markets, payment arrangements and diplomatic partners. India has become a major buyer of Russian oil while maintaining defence and energy links with Moscow. Modi and Putin, meeting in New Delhi on September 11, agreed to pursue stronger economic, defence and energy cooperation and reiterated a target of raising bilateral trade from nearly $70 billion to $100 billion by 2030.
Putin has also argued that BRICS should become more practical, with greater cooperation in technology, infrastructure, investment and payments. That is a different proposition from simply holding an annual summit and issuing declarations.
China has a larger strategic objective. Beijing wants greater influence in institutions where Western powers still set many of the rules, while reducing the vulnerability created by dependence on dollar-based finance and Western-controlled technology and markets. Xi’s message at the 2025 SCO summit in Tianjin was explicit when he called for a more representative global system and opposed what he described as hegemonism and power politics. The BRICS project fits that diplomatic language.
India’s calculation is different again. New Delhi does not want BRICS to become a China-Russia-led anti-American bloc. It wants BRICS as another instrument of strategic autonomy, alongside the Quad, the G20, relations with Europe and its bilateral partnership with the US. India’s insistence on national currencies and interoperable payment systems illustrates the distinction. It is looking for more options, rather than announcing the end of the dollar.
The China-India thaw is the real test
This is where the handshake becomes more than choreography. The 2020 Galwan clash froze much of the political relationship between India and China. Troops remained deployed along the disputed frontier, India restricted Chinese investment and apps, and direct connectivity suffered. An October 2024 disengagement agreement led to withdrawals from key friction points, followed by a gradual reopening of diplomatic and commercial channels.
Xi’s arrival in Delhi now gives both sides an opportunity to consolidate that thaw. China has said it wants to strengthen ties from a strategic and long-term perspective. India has resumed direct flights, eased some visa restrictions and relaxed parts of its earlier investment controls. Chinese companies have begun testing the waters again, although major firms remain wary of India’s security scrutiny.
The economics make the relationship impossible to ignore. Chinese imports into India reached $113.5 billion in 2024/25 and India’s trade deficit with China hit a record $99.2 billion. Electronics, batteries and solar equipment are among the areas where Indian industry remains heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains.
A thaw therefore has practical value for both governments. But it is not reconciliation. Military deployments along the border remain substantial, territorial disputes persist and Indian concerns about Chinese strategic behaviour have not disappeared. The trade deficit itself gives India a reason to seek more Chinese investment and imports of capital goods while simultaneously worrying about excessive dependence.
That is why a Modi-Xi meeting could matter more than another declaration about multipolarity. If the two governments can stabilise the border, restore business confidence and widen economic engagement without either side treating the relationship as a strategic partnership, BRICS becomes easier to operate. If the thaw stalls, BRICS’ two largest Asian members will continue to constrain one another from within.
The dollar question
The strongest case for BRICS changing the international system lies in finance, although it is also where expectations most often outrun reality.
The group has no common currency and there is no serious prospect of replacing the dollar with one in the near term. Instead, BRICS is working on less dramatic mechanisms such as settling more trade in national currencies, connecting payment systems and eventually improving interoperability between central-bank digital currencies.
India is pushing a proposal to link BRICS digital currencies for cross-border payments. The aim is faster and cheaper settlement, not a new reserve currency. Technical obstacles remain, including incompatible systems, currency convertibility, trade imbalances and India’s reluctance to create deep financial dependence on China.
The New Development Bank is the clearest existing BRICS institution. Established in 2015, it has approved about $42.9 billion for 139 projects, including infrastructure, water, transport and clean energy. India alone had 32 approved projects worth $9.53 billion by the end of 2025.
That is real institutional output, even if it remains small beside the lending capacity of the World Bank and other Western-backed institutions. Less glamorous than a new currency, the next step is expanding local-currency lending, improving payment links and giving the NDB more room to mobilise private capital.
BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors endorsed precisely this approach. They have called for reforms to the IMF and World Bank, greater use of national currencies and faster, cheaper and safer cross-border payment systems.
For BRICS, America is a booster, not glue
American pressure has helped push the three largest political powers closer, but it does not give the rest of BRICS a common foreign policy. India has faced US pressure over Russian oil. China remains America’s principal strategic competitor. Russia is under extensive Western sanctions. But the other BRICS countries have no common interest in confronting the US.
The Gulf states illustrate these limits. Saudi Arabia has continued to balance its relationships with the US and China rather than choosing one camp. The UAE is a BRICS member but has its own security and economic calculations. Brazil has traditionally resisted turning BRICS into an explicitly anti-Western organisation. Indonesia likewise has reasons to deepen relations with the US, China and other major economies simultaneously.
Even India’s BRICS diplomacy is about reforming the international system and widening its room for manoeuvre, not forming an alternative bloc with China and Russia.
So, can the handshake shake the order?
It can accelerate a change already under way, but it cannot accomplish it by itself. The evidence points to a world in which more countries want alternatives to Western financial and political structures without necessarily wanting to abandon them. BRICS gives them a forum for that hedging. Its population and economic weight give the forum credibility. Its NDB, payment discussions and expanding network give it some institutional substance.
But BRICS is still a coalition of countries that disagree on borders, wars, trade, security and even on whether the grouping should be directed against the West. Its failure to produce a foreign ministers’ communiqué in May showed how quickly those differences can become operational.
The image of Modi, Putin and Xi together from Tianjin in September 2025 was powerful precisely because it compressed three very different strategies into one frame. Modi wanted strategic room, Xi wanted a stronger non-Western centre of gravity and Putin wanted partners in a system from which Russia has been increasingly excluded. In New Delhi, the same three leaders have more reasons to stand together, but they also have more reasons to keep their distance.
The real test of the handshake will therefore be found in less photogenic places such as whether Indian and Chinese officials can keep their border détente intact, whether BRICS can make its payment infrastructure work, whether the NDB can scale up, and whether 11 countries can agree on enough common ground to turn declarations into institutions. For now, another Modi-Putin-Xi photograph after Tianjin last year will be a symbol of substance that has yet to appear.