Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit — their first formal talks in roughly five years, since the Galwan Valley clash of 2020 froze high-level engagement. Xi described India-China ties as 'worth cherishing.' Both leaders sought to consolidate a gradual diplomatic thaw, even as border sensitivities and disagreements over Taiwan and Tibet remain unresolved between the two neighbours.

The Modi–Xi bilateral at BRICS is significant for what it reverses as much as for what it achieves. After the June 2020 Galwan Valley clash in eastern Ladakh, India suspended most high-level political contacts with China, downgraded trade approvals, and tightened FDI screening for Chinese investment. The two leaders had last met formally on the sidelines of multilateral summits — including the G20 in Osaka (2019) — but direct bilateral engagement had collapsed.

BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), founded in 2009, provides a non-Western multilateral platform where India and China are co-members, making it a natural venue for managed diplomacy. The 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, was the first after the bloc's expansion to include Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Ethiopia, and Egypt — raising the platform's geopolitical weight.

For UPSC, the examiner tests both the static hinterland (BRICS founding, membership, India's role) and the dynamic layer (what changed, who said what, and what it implies for India's strategic autonomy). The 'thaw' framing matters: India has consistently maintained that normalisation requires full disengagement at friction points — Depsang and Demchok — before diplomatic resumption. That the bilateral happened signals some on-ground progress, without a final resolution. The tension between India's 'strategic autonomy' principle and alignment pressures from both Washington and Beijing forms the core geopolitical concept being tested here.