Guterres to sit at India's BRICS table on 12 and 13 September

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will attend the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. His spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said as much at the daily briefing on 1 September, while adding that a formal UN announcement had not yet been posted. The summit is at Bharat Mandapam. India holds the 2026 chair. The grouping is marking twenty years.

Asked whether Guterres would meet Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Delhi, Dujarric pointed first to the fact of the trip. Bilateral pull-asides at a leaders' summit are normal. They are not listed in advance by the UN podium.

Who else is coming

The Ministry of External Affairs has described the guest list as members, partners and outreach invitees. Russian President Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian are among those expected. Xi is widely expected. That mix, in the second week of September, sits on top of a week of US-Iran strikes around Hormuz and a running war in Ukraine.

India's chair theme is written as Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. The MEA says more than 350 meetings have already been held in over 25 Indian cities this year across the three BRICS pillars: political and security, economic and financial, and people-to-people. Those numbers are process. The two days in Delhi are the political product.

Why a UN chief in the room matters this year

Guterres's second five-year term ends in December 2026. He was in New Delhi in February for the India-AI Impact Summit. A return in September, to a table that includes Putin, Xi and an Iranian president whose country is under American fire, is a different kind of visit. The UN Security Council has not settled the Iran war. BRICS will not settle it either. Presence still has a use. It lets the Secretary-General speak to the same leaders in a hall that is not New York and is not a Western summit.

India wants the UN in the photograph because the chair year is also a campaign year for a non-permanent Security Council seat in 2028-29. Guterres wants access to capitals that no longer treat Geneva and New York as the only rooms that count. Those two needs meet on 12 September. What they produce will be in the communiqué, or in the meetings that never make the communiqué.