Modi warns against weaponising critical minerals with Xi in the room

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the second day of the 18th BRICS summit that “the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals could hinder our shared progress.” He spoke on Sunday at Bharat Mandapam in a session titled Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. Chinese President Xi Jinping was in the hall, along with Vladimir Putin, Masoud Pezeshkian, Anwar Ibrahim and Prabowo Subianto.

Modi did not name China. The numbers sitting behind the sentence are Chinese. The International Energy Agency puts China at 60 percent of global mined production of magnet rare earths in 2024 and 91 percent of refined output. Indian government trade data, cited by Business Standard, show China supplied about 85 to 90 percent by quantity of India’s permanent-magnet imports between 2022 and 2025, depending on the tariff line. India still imports all of the sintered neodymium-iron-boron magnets used in motors, turbines and defence hardware.

Beijing tightened rare-earth export controls in 2023, added heavier elements in April 2025, and expanded the list again in October. Some of those controls have since been eased. The sequence is public. So is India’s dependence. Sunday’s line therefore did two jobs at once. It told the room that supply-chain coercion is now a BRICS subject, and it told the one member that dominates refining that New Delhi will say so in front of him.

The rest of the speech was a catalogue of Indian chair initiatives. Modi said a BRICS logistics supply-chain cooperation framework would make routes “more reliable and resilient.” He announced, or restated, a BRICS Incubator Network, a proposed Startup Innovation Fund, a Network on Digital Agriculture that would put AI and geospatial tools against farm demand, and early-warning data guidelines for disaster management. Saturday’s 140-point New Delhi Declaration had already asked for “reliable, diversified, fair and just supply chains of critical minerals” while keeping “sovereign rights” over resources. Sunday added the sharper verb: weaponisation.

That word is doing work in more than one capital. The United States has spent two years building friend-shored magnet and battery chains. Europe has a Critical Raw Materials Act. India has a minerals mission and a still-thin magnet industry. None of those projects changes the 91 percent refining figure this year. What they change is the political cost of another export-licence freeze. Modi’s sentence raises that cost inside a club that includes both the refiner and the buyers.

Xi answered on the same day with a five-point plan of his own: an open-source BRICS AI community, a special economic zone partnership, a digital-industry cloud, help on smart factories, and an engineers’ alliance plus a youth science exchange. China will host a BRICS Forum on Trade in Services next year. The two speeches can be read as complements. They can also be read as a contest over who writes the rules for the next industrial stack. AI models need chips. Chips and motors need magnets. Magnets need the refined oxides that still leave Chinese plants.

Ordinary buyers will not feel Sunday as a communiqué. They will feel it if a licence delay stops a wind-turbine line in Tamil Nadu or a motor plant in Pune. The test of the new logistics framework is whether a member can still buy sintered magnets when another member is in a quarrel with Washington. The declaration does not settle that. The speech only names the risk.

The practical question for Indian ministries this week is narrower than the rhetoric. Can the magnet import share from China fall by a measurable amount before the next BRICS chair year, which belongs to China in 2027? If it cannot, Sunday’s warning will be quoted against New Delhi rather than against Beijing.