India hosted the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026, under a chairship it assumed on 1 January. The bloc now has eleven members, after Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia joined in 2024 and Indonesia in 2025.
Xi Jinping arrived on 12 September and left the following afternoon — his first visit to India as Chinese president since the 2019 informal summit at Mamallapuram, and the first since the Galwan valley clashes of June 2020 killed twenty Indian soldiers. He held one bilateral meeting, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The two have now met three years running, after Kazan in 2024 and Tianjin in 2025.
The joint declaration took negotiation: officials worked until four in the morning on 12 September to reach consensus, with India running the consultations. It calls for calm in the Middle East, opposes unilateral sanctions not authorised by the UN Security Council, and backs reform of the World Trade Organization including restoration of its appellate body. China takes the chair next.
Modi used the session to warn that the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals could hold back shared progress, and proposed a Seafarers Emergency Support Network — a live concern with the Strait of Hormuz contested and Red Sea shipping under threat. The summit also produced a BRICS Logistics Supply Chain Cooperation Framework and an action plan on global value chains running to 2030.
The diplomatic groundwork ran ahead of the summit. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Beijing and agreed eight points on advancing boundary delimitation and border management, and the two armies held a corps-commander-level meeting in Arunachal Pradesh on 6 September. The border dispute itself remains unresolved.
