BRICS summit in New Delhi: India presides, Putin, Xi and Pezeshkian at the table

The eighteenth annual BRICS summit is being held in New Delhi, with India holding the rotating presidency. More than a dozen heads of state and government are at the table: Narendra Modi is hosting Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and representatives of the bloc’s other eight member countries (Al Jazeera; NPR).

The work programme, as reported by the two outlets, focuses on trade, investment and international conflicts. At the time of publication, the summit’s final documents are not available: this newspaper does not anticipate the content of a joint declaration it has not been able to read, and confines itself to what the sources establish — the composition of the table, the venue, the calendar.

The bilateral meetings. Before the opening of proceedings, on Friday, Modi separately received Putin and Pezeshkian in New Delhi (Al Jazeera; NPR). On the content of these two bilateral talks, the sources available to us do not provide detailed accounts; we record the fact that they took place and their placement in the calendar, on the eve of the plenary session.

The security framework. Around thirty thousand additional officers were deployed to protect the event in the Indian capital (NPR). This figure gives a sense of the logistical scale of the event rather than its political weight: a deployment of that magnitude concerns managing a city of tens of millions of inhabitants for a few days, not the outcome of the negotiations.

The context that matters. The summit falls two weeks before an engagement set elsewhere: on 24 September Xi Jinping is expected in the United States for a state visit (Al Jazeera; NPR). The sequence of the two engagements is a matter of scheduling, and we report it as such. What one means for the other — whether the New Delhi stop serves to prepare the Washington one, or whether the two tables remain separate — is a matter of interpretation: none of the available sources asserts it, and this newspaper does not formulate it in their place.

What we do not write. The sources speak of a bloc with twelve members in total, but do not provide, in this dossier, an updated list or the precise terms of the most recent accessions: publishing a list without documentary confirmation would mean turning memory into fact, and memory is not a source. Likewise, we do not attribute to the participants negotiating positions that neither source reports. The two available sources are independent of each other and converge on the elements reported above; on everything else, the piece stops here.

The next verifiable element of the story is already dated: 24 September, with Xi’s state visit to the United States. On that date, and on the summit’s concluding documents once they are fully accessible, we will return with the texts in hand.

Sources: Al Jazeera (12 September 2026); NPR (12 September 2026).