BRICS Adopts New Delhi Declaration as Xi and Putin Join Modi, Rebuking US Tariffs

Leaders of the eleven-nation BRICS bloc unanimously adopted a 140-point declaration in New Delhi on Saturday, closing a two-day summit that brought Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to India together for the first time since the country's 2020 border clash with Beijing, and that produced a joint rebuke of the tariff policies pursued by the United States under President Donald Trump.

The 18th BRICS Summit, held at the Bharat Mandapam convention centre in Pragati Maidan under India's rotating chairship, was the largest diplomatic gathering New Delhi has hosted since the G20 summit in 2023. Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over sessions that included, in person, Xi, Putin, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the United Arab Emirates' Khaled bin Mohamed Al Nahyan, with Brazil represented by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira. Ten partner states, including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Vietnam and Uzbekistan, sent delegations, alongside representatives of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and other multilateral bodies.

A declaration built on hard-won consensus, and the numbers behind it

The centrepiece of the summit was the New Delhi Declaration, published by India's Ministry of External Affairs and adopted without dissent despite what officials described as days of difficult negotiation over language on the Middle East and on trade. The text voices "serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules," language read by most delegations as a direct response to the tariff regime the Trump administration has imposed on several BRICS economies, including India, this year. It also condemns "any acts of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation," and separately denounces the April 22, 2025, attack in Pahalgam, in Jammu and Kashmir, in which 26 people were killed, calling for "concerted actions against all UN designated terrorists and terrorist entities."

On the Middle East, where members remain divided — Iran and the United Arab Emirates sit in the same bloc while pursuing sharply different postures toward the conflict that has unsettled the region through 2026 — the declaration calls only for "maximum restraint" and protection of civilians, stopping short of assigning blame. Negotiators also declined to advance a common BRICS currency, an idea Trump has cited when threatening penalties against the bloc, instead endorsing continued growth in local-currency trade settlement between members.

BRICS has grown considerably since its founding as a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. With Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE admitted in 2024 and Indonesia joining as a full member last year, the bloc's eleven members now account for roughly 49.5 percent of the world's population, close to 3.9 billion people, and about 41 percent of global gross domestic product, compared with roughly 28 percent for the Group of Seven industrialized economies, according to figures cited during India's chairship and reported by Indian business outlets tracking the summit. The bloc's economic weight remains lopsided: China alone generates an estimated 48.5 percent of combined BRICS output, with India contributing about 20.7 percent and Russia 8.2 percent. Security for the gathering involved close to 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel deployed across the capital, with anti-drone systems and layered traffic cordons around the venue.

Two rivals test a reset

The summit's most closely watched moment was a roughly 40-minute bilateral meeting between Modi and Xi on Saturday, the Chinese leader's first visit to India in nearly seven years and another step in a slow thaw following the deadly 2020 clash in the Galwan Valley, in which at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed. According to a readout published by India's foreign ministry, the two leaders "welcomed the steady progress" in relations since they last met in Tianjin in 2025 and agreed both countries should take "a strategic and long-term perspective" of their ties. Modi told Xi that peace along the disputed frontier was essential to the broader relationship and that both sides should honour existing agreements, framing the relationship around what he called three mutuals: mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest.

"China and India are partners, not rivals," Xi told Modi, according to a statement from China's foreign ministry, adding that the two countries present opportunities rather than threats to each other's development.

Tens of thousands of troops remain stationed along the contested Line of Actual Control, and the two governments have yet to fully disengage from positions taken after 2020. But the two leaders instructed officials to work toward what both sides called a fair and mutually acceptable settlement, and to expand business links, mobility and cultural exchange — a notable shift after years in which India restricted Chinese investment and app access on security grounds. India also runs a large and growing trade deficit with China, a point Modi raised in pressing for what New Delhi calls more predictable market access, according to an Associated Press dispatch from New Delhi.

Who the outcomes touch, and how leaders are reacting

The declaration's language on tariffs lands most directly on the economies still absorbing US duties imposed this year, India among them, and on companies in those countries that trade heavily with the American market. Its terrorism language speaks most directly to India, which has pushed since the Pahalgam attack for BRICS partners — several of whom maintain close ties with Pakistan — to explicitly name the episode in a consensus text. Farmers, energy firms and defence manufacturers in India and Russia stand to be affected by a separate push, agreed a day earlier when Putin met Modi ahead of the main summit, to lift annual bilateral trade to $100 billion by 2030 through expanded cooperation on nuclear energy, fertiliser, steel, rail transit, critical minerals and defence hardware, including discussion of Su-57 fighter jets and outstanding S-400 air-defence deliveries. Putin brought a delegation of more than 300 Russian executives to New Delhi to pursue supply-chain and food-security contracts, according to reporting from the Moscow Times.

Officials in New Delhi framed the declaration as vindication of India's approach to a bloc pulled between more confrontational instincts in Moscow and Beijing and India's own effort to keep relations with Washington intact. The document's condemnation of the Pahalgam attack drew a notably warm response from Indian commentators, who noted BRICS partners had for years resisted such explicit language; an analysis published by Outlook India called the passage one of the summit's clearer diplomatic wins for the host government. Trump has previously said any country aligning itself with what he called the bloc's "anti-American policies" would face an additional 10 percent tariff on exports to the United States, a threat that hung over the summit without being directly answered in the New Delhi Declaration's carefully hedged trade language.

Domestically, the summit drew a mixed reaction. India's main opposition Congress party criticised the government's handling of the declaration process, while the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party pointed to the consensus text, and to Xi's visit, as evidence the summit had strengthened India's hand. Schools and government offices in parts of Delhi closed for a day to accommodate the security operation, a disruption similar to that seen during the 2023 G20 summit at the same venue.

What happens next

China takes over the BRICS chairship for 2027, a transition that will test whether Xi presses the bloc toward the more explicitly anti-Western positioning some members have favoured, or continues the more consensus-driven approach India pursued this year. Officials from India and China said working-level talks on disengagement along the Line of Actual Control and on market access would continue in the coming months, without a fixed date for the next round. India and Russia are expected to work toward the $100 billion trade target through follow-up ministerial meetings, while the bloc's response to further US tariff moves — and any retaliatory measures — is likely to shape the early tone of Beijing's chairship. For now, the declaration's adoption stands as the summit's concrete result: a single text that eleven governments, several of them at odds with one another on other matters, agreed to sign.