Behind the Xi-Modi thaw, a larger US-China game Brics

This article was originally published as Jabin T. Jacob.  2026. ‘China Compass | Beyond Brics bonhomie: China’s India strategy and the US factor’, Firstpost, 21 September.

Now that we are at some distance from the pomp and ceremony of the 18th BRICS Summit hosted by New Delhi, it is perhaps easier to reflect and realise that while multilateralism is not quite dead the BRICS remains less than the sum of the bilateral relations between its members. The most consequential of these for India remain its relationship with China. And here, the contrast between the length of the BRICS Declaration and the brevity of the respective Indian and Chinese statements on the sidelines meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping tells a story in itself.

Indian Dependence

By contrast, some Chinese analysts of bilateral ties with India have been quite elaborate in their assessment of the Summit and the Modi-Xi meeting. One of the most important analyses is an interview in a Chinese online outlet, of Hu Shisheng, the top South Asia expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think-tank under the Ministry of State Security that oversees China’s external intelligence operations. Hu pointed out that India-China relations were not being reset as much as finding a floor below which they would not fall. He declared clearly what Chinese official statements only hint at – that this was “tactical rapprochement, not a strategic reconciliation”. Even so, he was at pains to dismiss Indian stress on what was effectively a heavily militarized boundary and the possible risks this entailed stating that the two countries had moved from “crisis management” to “border management”. The effort, is clearly, to convince the Indians that the relationship is back on track and that continuing suspicions of China are unwarranted.

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