Power is not just about who is in the room. It is about who can bring the room together.
Every international summit leaves behind a familiar set of photographs: leaders shaking hands,
delegations arranged around long tables, flags aligned behind rehearsed smiles. The BRICS Summit
in New Delhi produced those images too, but it also produced a handful of moments that were
never meant to become the story. A President skipping dinner. A vegetarian banquet turning into a
national argument. A Crown Prince stepping back to shake hands with the driver who had brought
him to the airport. Taken together, these moments say almost as much about where the world is
heading as the New Delhi Declaration does.
Last year, I asked whether BRICS was broken or building. A year later, New Delhi gave us reason to
ask a different question: is BRICS finally beginning to build?
The most consequential image from New Delhi was not a line in the declaration. It was the simple
fact of who was in the room. Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin represent three of the
most consequential centres of power in Eurasia, and their interests are far from aligned. India and
China remain strategic competitors with an unresolved and sensitive boundary. Russia and China
maintain their own deep partnership. India and Russia carry a long and separate strategic
relationship of their own. Disagreements over borders, trade, sanctions and the future balance of
power run through all three relationships at once. Yet all three leaders came to India, and that fact
matters more than any single bilateral outcome. In a fragmented world, power is measured not
only by military weight or economic size but by the capacity to convene: the ability to bring
competing powers into the same room and have them treat the conversation as worth attending.
That was New Delhi’s real achievement. India was not asking for a seat at a conversation about the
future world order. It was hosting that conversation. The New Delhi Declaration itself reflected the
difficulty of the balancing act, with an expanded and increasingly diverse BRICS still reaching
consensus on global conflicts, institutional reform, supply chains, health, artificial intelligence and
financial cooperation. For a group with this much internal disagreement, consensus on that range
of subjects is not a small thing.
That same tension between competition and cooperation showed up in the body language of the
summit itself. Formal diplomacy is scripted, but some of the most revealing moments happen
around its edges. The Modi-Xi bilateral drew outsized attention precisely because India and China
do not need more photographs together; they need functioning channels of conversation. The
boundary dispute remains sensitive, competition between the two economies is intensifying rather
than easing, and no single meeting manufactures trust that has been eroded over years. Even so,
the meeting itself carried meaning. Two large powers can compete on trade, technology and
security without converting every point of friction into open confrontation, and choosing dialogue
over silence is itself a diplomatic signal. The more informal imagery involving Modi and Putin
travelled even faster online, the kind of candid gesture that gets replayed and over-read on social
media within hours. A photograph is not foreign policy, and it would be a mistake to treat body
language as a substitute for the substance of a relationship. But atmosphere is part of how
diplomacy is conducted, not a footnote to it, and New Delhi left behind an unambiguous
impression: India was not peripheral to the Eurasian conversation happening around it. It was
central to it. That impression was reinforced by the formal agenda itself, with Modi holding
substantive bilateral engagements alongside a broader grouping working through conflict, trade,
energy, institutional reform and the future shape of international cooperation.
Beneath the imagery, the more substantive question the summit tried to answer was what BRICS
actually intends to build. For much of its history, the grouping has been easier to define by what it
opposes than by what it constructs: a Western-dominated order, unequal institutional
representation, an overconcentration of financial power, the marginalisation of developing
economies. The New Delhi summit pushed toward a harder question than opposition. The answer
emerging from the declaration is not one grand alternative currency, one military alliance or one
shared ideology. It is closer to an ecosystem of practical alternatives across payments, technology,
supply chains, health security, artificial intelligence and critical minerals. The declaration placed
particular emphasis on resilient supply chains, critical mineral value chains, cooperation on AI,
health preparedness and cross-border payment mechanisms that allow settlement in local
currencies according to each country’s own priorities.
Artificial intelligence sat at the centre of that construction project, even though it received
comparatively little coverage relative to its importance. Future geopolitical competition will still
involve oil, territory and military alliances, but it will increasingly be shaped by data, computing
capacity, semiconductors, quantum research and digital infrastructure. The BRICS declaration
treated AI as a major opportunity while stressing international cooperation, accessibility, safety and
a meaningful role for the Global South in shaping how the technology develops rather than simply
absorbing it. That distinction matters for developing economies, whose real anxiety is not falling
behind on a specific technology but becoming permanently dependent on systems designed,
controlled and governed elsewhere. The argument taking shape within BRICS is broader than
technology transfer. It is about participation in setting the terms under which the technology is
built.
A related theme ran alongside AI throughout the summit: critical minerals such as lithium, rare
earths, cobalt and nickel, which will determine the pace of battery production, electric vehicles,
renewable energy and advanced electronics. The old strategic question centred on who controlled
oil reserves. The emerging question is who controls the materials the next industrial cycle depends
on, and just as importantly, who controls the processing and manufacturing capacity built around
those materials. The declaration recognised the need for resilient and diversified critical mineral
supply chains along with value addition in resource-rich countries, which is a meaningful shift from
simply extracting a resource to building an industry around it.
Money followed the same pattern of modest, practical ambition rather than dramatic rupture. The
conversation around BRICS and de-dollarisation is frequently overstated, and New Delhi did not
produce any announcement of a single currency displacing the dollar. What it produced instead
was a more modest and more realistic set of commitments: expanding local-currency trade,
improving interoperability between payment systems, and reducing the vulnerability that comes
from depending on a single financial channel. The declaration referred specifically to exploring
cross-border payment solutions and promoting settlement and investment in local currencies
according to each member’s own priorities. The more accurate way to read this is not that BRICS is
trying to remove the dollar from the world economy tomorrow, but that it is trying to ensure the
dollar is not the only door through which international transactions must pass.
Health security carried a similar practicality. One of the more concrete outcomes of the summit
concerned an area COVID demonstrated can turn into an economic crisis, a supply chain crisis and a
political crisis within weeks. The declaration committed to stronger disease surveillance,
preparedness and an integrated early-warning approach among member states. This reflects a
wider redefinition of security itself. A country’s borders being secure means little if a virus can still
shut down its economy or if its access to essential medicines depends entirely on supply chains it
does not control. Health has moved from being a side issue in geopolitics to being one of its central
concerns.
Alongside all of this policy architecture, one of India’s loudest domestic debates during the summit
came from something far removed from trade or AI governance: the gala dinner menu. The
banquet was entirely vegetarian, and that single fact reopened a familiar question about
representation. India’s vegetarian cuisine, from millet-based dishes to regional specialities, is
genuinely one of the richest culinary traditions in the world, and there is no serious argument
against that. But India is also Kashmiri Wazwan, Hyderabadi Biryani, Goan Seafood, Bengali Fish
Curry, Punjabi Tandoori cooking, Coastal Kerala Food and the meat-based cuisines of the Northeast.
The debate was never really about whether vegetarian food is good. It was about whether any
single culinary tradition, however rich, can stand in for a country with hundreds of distinct food
cultures. Supporters framed the menu as a showcase of Indian tradition, while critics argued it
flattened the country’s culinary diversity into a single, more conveniently presentable identity.
India’s diversity does not only show up in its languages, religions and dress. It shows up on the plate
as well, and a menu that erases that diversity says something about how the country chooses to
present itself, intentionally or not.
The dinner produced a second, unrelated controversy in the form of an empty chair. Xi Jinping’s
absence from the banquet produced immediate speculation about tension or displeasure, but the
honest answer is that no official reason was confirmed in the reporting available at the time,
beyond suggestions that he had returned to rest after a long day. In modern diplomacy, an empty
chair can become a headline on its own, but repetition is not evidence, and the more responsible
reading is that Xi’s absence raised a question rather than answered one.
The moment that will likely be remembered longest from the summit had nothing to do with power
at all. As the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, was
leaving after his engagements, a video showed him turning back to personally acknowledge and
thank his Indian driver. No treaty depended on it, no protocol required it, and no negotiation
hinged on it. It was simply recognition, and it resonated precisely because it required nothing of
him. Position determines where a person sits and how many people wait outside a room for them.
Character is often revealed by how that same person treats the one who drove them there.
Set against all of this, New Delhi did not produce a new world order in two days, and no summit
could. BRICS still carries serious internal contradictions. India and China remain competitors.
Members disagree on how to characterise ongoing conflicts. They do not share a single political
ideology or a military alliance, and they do not view the West through the same lens. The bloc’s
diversity is simultaneously its greatest strength and its most persistent difficulty, since bringing that
many divergent interests to the same table is an achievement in itself, even when the same
diversity makes it hard to agree on what should happen next. What the summit did demonstrate is
that the old international order is being questioned more openly than at any point in decades, and
the new one has not yet been written.
In that unsettled space, India is positioning itself less as a country asking for a seat and more as a country capable of hosting the table itself. The declaration’s language on AI, critical minerals and local-currency settlement will matter more in the long run than any single photograph from the summit. But the dinner menu, the empty chair and the handshake with a driver will likely be what people remember first, and that says something true about how influence is built in public: through documents, certainly, but also through the moments that happen just outside the frame.
Dr. Gaurav Vaid
Writer & Analyst
gauravvaid2010@gmail.com
Source: https://greaterjammu.com/epaper/epaper/edition/1099/epaper15-9-2026/page/6