NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Friday will bring two of the most consequential relationships in India’s strategic calculus into sharp focus even as the BRICS summit unfolds under the shadow of an intensifying West Asia war and renewed global efforts to end the conflict in Ukraine. Friday also marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, an event that reshaped the security architecture of West Asia and triggered two decades of wars, interventions and geopolitical realignments.
A quarter century later, the region is again edging towards a wider confrontation, with attacks on commercial shipping and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz adding an immediate economic dimension to the crisis.
For New Delhi, the Modi-Pezeshkian meeting comes less than two weeks after their talks in Bishkek and will carry both a diplomatic and strategic message. Iran is now a full BRICS member, while its confrontation with Israel and the US is creating some of the sharpest divisions within the expanded grouping. India has sought to keep channels open with Tehran while stressing sovereignty, dialogue and regional stability.
The meeting with Putin, meanwhile, comes as Moscow remains central to the international effort, and competing diplomatic initiatives, aimed at finding a pathway to peace in Ukraine. For India, which has consistently called for dialogue and diplomacy rather than a battlefield solution, the conversation with Putin offers another opportunity to reinforce its position while protecting a relationship that extends far beyond the war.
The economic agenda will be equally important. Officials expect the two sides to explore deeper cooperation across the critical-minerals value chain, including access to Russian resources, processing and downstream applications. India is looking at potential cooperation involving lithium, nickel, molybdenum and caesium as it seeks reliable supplies for electric vehicles, renewable energy, electronics and defence manufacturing.
Defence will remain another pillar of the relationship, even as India steadily diversifies its military procurement. The broader challenge is to move the India-Russia relationship towards co-production, technology partnerships and new economic linkages rather than allowing it to remain defined primarily by traditional defence ties.
That is also the larger proposition India is bringing to BRICS. The grouping is being positioned not as an anti-Western bloc, but as a platform for a more representative global order , one that gives the Global South greater agency over energy, food, supply chains, finance and technology.