The Chinese President is anticipated to hold discussions with India in September when he will visit the country during the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi from September 12 to 13. This would be his first visit to the country in almost 7 years. The visit by Xi Jinping to India would be his first India visit since the informal meeting in Mamallapuram, India, back in 2019, months before the heightened tensions between the two Asian giants after the deadly clash in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh in June 2020. China has said it will be sending a high-level official to the meeting with New Delhi, though an official confirmation has yet to be received as preparations for the summit ramp up, officials cited by multiple reports said.

The planned visit comes after China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a bilateral meeting during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in China’s port city of Tianjin in August 2025, agreeing to take measures to stabilise the relationship between the two countries. Xi has accepted the invitation and pledged support for India’s BRICS presidency this year, though Beijing’s foreign ministry has yet to confirm Xi’s visit to India; it said that it was supporting New Delhi’s effort to make the summit a “full success.” The summit will be attended by the leaders of the expanded BRICS grouping, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has already been confirmed by Iranian officials, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The country has also extended an invitation to several leaders from the non-BRICS group as special guests, such as Bangladesh’s head of government as the current chair of BIMSTEC, highlighting the size of the gathering that New Delhi is hosting this year.

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In the event that Xi’s visit to India takes place, it will be the first time the Chinese leader has been to India since his informal Wuhan-style meeting with Modi, and it will be the fourth trip to India since his 2013 arrival. His most recent visit was in October 2019, mere months before the conflict along the Galwan Valley, in which twenty Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops died in hand-to-hand combat, which brought bilateral relations to their lowest ebb in recent decades and sparked a longstanding military standoff along the Line of Actual Control. Since then, both nations have maintained thousands of army personnel on the disputed Himalayan border, and although the talks at both the diplomatic and military level have been ongoing in fits and starts, any visit by the Chinese leader would be closely monitored.

India-China relations have been warming up, albeit at a sluggish pace, over the last two years, and that’s why Xi Jinping’s visit to India is coming into the discussion. A military disengagement agreement, signed in October 2024, reduced tensions at various LOC points, and this was subsequently followed by the gradual resumption of direct commercial flights between the two countries that had been suspended since the pandemic and stand-off in the LOC area. Additionally, visa

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restrictions have been relaxed for both sides, and even though it is the strategic mistrust that remains, China participated in India’s AI Impact Summit earlier this year, reflecting some technological and economic engagement in the process. At the same time, Modi and Xi have also had several bilateral meetings on the sidelines of other multilateral events, including the BRICS Summit in Kazan, 2024, and the SCO Summit in Tianjin, where both leaders spoke of their efforts to stabilise the relationship despite the ongoing border dispute. These moves have done little to curb the substantial military presence on both sides of the disputed border, and officials on both sides have taken care to say that the recent thaw is gradual and not a wholesale solution to the underlying tensions.

If confirmed, Xi Jinping’s visit to India would be highly symbolic as it comes on the heels of increased geopolitical uncertainty, which has included new trade tensions between major economies, conflict in West Asia and a broader drive by emerging economies to build closer ties with one another, including through BRICS as an alternative to Western institutions. As the chair of the BRICS summit this year, India is consolidating its image as a key player in the developing world, and ensuring that its priorities of reform of multilateral institutions, counter-terrorism cooperation and the use of digital tools for sustainable development will receive a boost at the summit. If Xi Jinping visits India, it will mark a level of normalisation in relations at a time when Beijing is also dealing with complex relations with Washington and other key powers, such as an alleged trip by Xi to the U.S. in September, which would give him an unusually packed travel schedule in just a few weeks.

The BRICS group, which was originally a collection of the five large, emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa has been significantly enlarged over the past few years and now includes several other countries, giving it greater representation of the world’s emerging population, production and trade. The summit in New Delhi this year is expected to take up the fight against global financial institutions, de-dollarisation, cooperation of supply chains and coordinated action to counter Western economies’ sanctions and trade restrictions from the Kazan, Russia meeting last year. Putin, Pezeshkian and possibly Xi will be present along with Modi, making the meeting of New Delhi even more significant than the bilateral India-China one that Xi Jinping’s visit to India would add on its own, as it will involve leaders of countries facing some of the worst bilateral relations with the United States and its allies.

A visit by Xi Jinping to India, if confirmed, would be one of the biggest diplomatic events between the two neighbours since relations cooled down after the Galwan clash, and would be closely watched for signals of any further step towards a true reset, such as a bilateral meeting of the leaders on the sidelines of the summit. Such a meeting could also provide both leaders with an opportunity to discuss issues that have long plagued the bilateral relationship, including de-escalation of tensions along the border, troop withdrawals, trade imbalances, curbs on technology transfers and much more, even though both countries have resumed their day-to-day interactions in other areas such as flights, visas and multilateral diplomacy. So far, the officials in both capitals have been tight-lipped in their public statements, afraid of setting the bar too high in advance of a summit that is still more than a month away, and whose guest list, especially in China, is not yet ironed out. So far, this trip has emerged as one of the more awaited

developments in the lead-up to the BRICS meeting, and the world now awaits the city of New Delhi for a wider geopolitical realignment between both the major and emerging powers.