Xi Jinping to visit India for the BRICS summit, his first trip in seven years

The thaw has been slow and technical. The four-year face-off began to ease in October 2024, when the two countries reached an understanding on disengagement at the last friction points, Depsang and Demchok. Modi and Xi met days afterwards on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan and agreed to restart the mechanisms for handling the border dispute.

Since then the rebuilding has been incremental: direct flights have resumed and the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra has been revived. In May the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs reviewed the frontier and recorded progress in keeping it quiet.

The most substantial movement came in August, when National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi — the two countries' Special Representatives on the boundary question — agreed an eight-point consensus covering additional military meeting points, new hotline channels and the reopening of three designated border trading posts. On 6 September the two armies held their first corps commander-level meeting in the eastern sector, in Arunachal Pradesh.

New Delhi's position has not moved: peace along the border is the precondition for normal relations. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar restated it to Wang at their most recent meeting.

A city on security footing

Delhi Police have deployed around 30,000 personnel for the summit, covering the airport, the hotels and Bharat Mandapam, the venue. About half are from Delhi Police and the rest from paramilitary forces. The security grid has been divided into sectors, each under a deputy commissioner or additional deputy commissioner.

Chinese and Russian advance teams are already inside the hotels where their presidents will stay. "Security teams from China and Russia have already arrived at the hotels where the leaders are expected to stay", a source told the Indian Express, adding that they had brought advanced weapons and equipment, and that personnel had been posted from the floors the presidents will occupy up to the rooftops and down to the ground floors.

The Delhi Police Special Cell has been given responsibility for Xi's security. At Putin's hotel, an additional deputy commissioner and two assistant commissioners have been assigned across separate shifts. Every hotel employee has been vetted, with checks run both in Delhi and in their home states. Both leaders are expected to fly in some of their own vehicles and convoy cars.

The delegations are being spread across the city. The presidents of Indonesia and Kazakhstan, Ethiopia's prime minister and Thailand's deputy prime minister and finance minister are to share one hotel; the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and the finance ministers of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Brazil another. Iran's president is to be housed separately.

What the summit has to hold together

The timing gives the meeting weight beyond the bilateral. With the war in West Asia and the fighting in Ukraine both unresolved, BRICS is being asked to speak with one voice at a moment when its members disagree, and negotiators have spent the run-up trying to bridge the divide within the group.

For India the calculation is narrower. Hosting Xi and Putin in the same week, days after an army-level meeting in Arunachal Pradesh, is an assertion that Delhi can hold a difficult relationship with Beijing and a long-standing one with Moscow at the same time — while conceding nothing on the border question that broke the first of them.