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Snapshot of the day
September 9, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi & Anirudh S.K.
China says it supports India hosting the BRICS leaders’ summit in New Delhi on September 12-13, but has stopped short of confirming whether President Xi Jinping will attend. The uncertainty is telling.
New Delhi is preparing for a summit at a moment when its much-advertised “strategic autonomy” increasingly resembles a difficult balancing act. India wants neither a China-Russia-led BRICS fashioned into an explicitly anti-Western bloc nor a Western alignment that leaves it estranged from Moscow and Beijing. US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable Washington has made that tightrope narrower still.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is expected to arrive with some serious hardware on the table. Moscow says the sale of its fifth-generation Su-57 stealth fighter will be on the agenda when Putin and Modi hold bilateral talks on Friday, ahead of the BRICS leaders’ summit. India is seeking technology transfer and local production, while the two sides are also discussing wider defence cooperation, including upgrades to jointly produced missiles such as the BrahMos.
Xi, if he comes, arrives with considerably more complicated baggage. It would be his first visit to India in seven years and his first since the 2020 border clashes killed 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese troops. Yet the economic disengagement promised after Galwan has steadily given way to re-engagement. The Financial Times reports that bilateral trade reached a record $155 billion last year, up 12.4%, and has more than doubled over the past decade. In the first seven months of this year, it jumped another 23%.
It took the BJP-ruled Uttarakhand’s police 29 days to lodge a proper FIR in connection with a Hindutva group’s ‘purification’ ritual conducted on a ground where Rajya Sabha LoP Mallikarjun Kharge had delivered an address last month. Though it is publicly known who conducted the havan, the police have registered the case against unknown persons. This isn’t the only FIR they’ve lodged in connection with the incident – their first one named Kharge’s Lok Sabha counterpart Rahul Gandhi as an accused.
