Modi's summit diary: Putin and Pezeshkian on Friday, Xi on Saturday
A strategic economic dialogue is reported to be on the table for the Modi–Xi meeting — machinery, rather than another handshake.
Narendra Modi will hold three bilateral meetings across two days at the BRICS summit, and the diary tells you how India has ranked them: Vladimir Putin at 3.30pm on Friday, Masoud Pezeshkian at 6.15pm the same evening, and Xi Jinping at 5.45pm on Saturday.
Putin and Pezeshkian both arrived in New Delhi on Friday. Xi follows for a meeting that will be his first substantive encounter with Modi on Indian soil in seven years.
Friday: Russia, then Iran
The order of the first two meetings is not arbitrary.
The Putin meeting is scheduled to run through trade resilience, cross-border payment mechanisms, energy security and conflict-resolution pathways covering both Eastern Europe and West Asia. It is the second Modi–Putin meeting in under a fortnight, after the SCO summit in Bishkek on 31 August.
Two hours and forty-five minutes later, Modi sits down with the president of Iran — a country at war with the United States since February, and one of the three BRICS members whose positions on that war are the reason the summit's joint declaration is still unwritten.
Holding both meetings on the day before the summit opens gives India something specific: it will walk into Saturday's closed-door session having heard directly from Moscow and from Tehran, rather than negotiating the text through officials alone.
Saturday: the one everyone is waiting for
The Modi–Xi meeting at 5.45pm on Saturday is the headline engagement of the weekend.
An Indian Express report says a strategic economic dialogue is on the table for the meeting — a signal of intent to restore structured engagement between the two economies after years of estrangement following Galwan.
That phrase is worth sitting with. A strategic economic dialogue is machinery: a standing channel through which trade, investment and technology questions get worked rather than raised. India and China have had plenty of leader-level meetings in the past six years; what they have not had is a working mechanism underneath them.
Whether it is announced, and in what form, is the substantive test of Saturday's meeting. Everything else about the encounter — the handshake, the photograph, the seven-year gap — is atmospherics.
What the three meetings have in common
Each is a relationship India is managing rather than settling.
With Russia, the issue is how to keep expanding a $60 billion trade relationship built substantially on discounted crude when the payment channels are constrained and the oil price has moved above $100 a barrel.
With Iran, it is that India needs both Tehran and the Gulf states, and the war has made that harder to sustain — while as summit chair India is simultaneously trying to draft language on the conflict that Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia will all sign.
With China, it is that the two largest economies in the bloc are also each other's most direct competitors within it, and that Chinese restrictions on technology exports and investment have had concrete effects on Indian manufacturing.
The summit around them
The 18th BRICS summit runs at Bharat Mandapam on 12 and 13 September, bringing together the leaders of member and partner countries for discussions on global economic and geopolitical questions.
India, holding the chair, is expected to focus on trade, investment, energy, food security and cooperation among countries of the Global South.
That is the agenda a chair sets when it wants deliverables that do not require anyone to change their position on a war.
Who else is in the building
The bilaterals sit inside a considerably larger guest list. Around 16 heads of state are expected, according to Delhi Police, several requiring high-level protection.
Alongside Putin, Xi and Pezeshkian, those attending include South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with leaders of BRICS member and partner countries and outreach invitees making up the rest.
That is the context in which three scheduled bilaterals is a deliberate choice rather than an obvious one. A host with sixteen visiting leaders could fill two days entirely with fifteen-minute courtesies. India has instead given Russia, Iran and China a slot each, and left the rest to the plenary.
What to watch for
Three things will be visible by Saturday evening.
Whether the Putin meeting produces anything concrete on payments, or only a restatement of the $100 billion by 2030 trade target. Whether the Pezeshkian meeting is followed by movement in the declaration drafting, which is the only place its effect would show. And whether the Modi–Xi meeting yields the strategic economic dialogue that has been reported as being on the table.
Bilateral meetings at multilateral summits are frequently ceremonial — leaders in the same building take the opportunity. These three are not, and the scheduling shows it: India has given each of them a slot of its own on either side of the summit it is hosting.
