Modi warns BRICS that mineral and tech controls block shared growth

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the closing BRICS session on "Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" that "the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals can hinder our shared progress." Chinese President Xi Jinping was at the table in Bharat Mandapam, along with Vladimir Putin, Masoud Pezeshkian, Anwar Ibrahim and Prabowo Subianto. Modi added that India, in the chair, had "emphasised inclusivity in the adoption of technology."

He did not name a country. The audience did not need the name. China refines about 90 percent of global rare earths and last year tightened export licences on rare earths and other inputs during the tariff fight with the United States. Some of those controls have since been eased. Indian manufacturers of electronics, magnets and clean-energy kit still treat Chinese licensing as a planning risk. Officials in Delhi pointed reporters to paragraph 67 of the New Delhi Declaration, which calls for "reliable, responsible, diversified, resilient, fair, sustainable and just supply chains" while preserving sovereign rights over the minerals. The sentence is close to last year's Rio language.

Modi's four pillars for the Indian presidency were resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. He said the group had turned that list into "a win-win situation." The more concrete claim, from Indian briefers, is that Delhi extracted a consensus declaration from an 11-member table that included both the United Arab Emirates and Iran while a war in West Asia was live. That drafting work is the part of the summit that does not show up in a single quote and is the part other chairs will try to copy.

Critical minerals sit under that diplomatic success as an unresolved fight. India wants processing capacity at home and more than one supplier abroad. China wants to keep the refining step. The United States and Europe want their own midstream. A BRICS sentence about diversified chains does not move a tonne of separated rare earths. It does give Indian ministries a line to quote when they ask member states for joint processing projects that are not routed through Chinese plants.

Xi's answer in the same session was not a minerals pledge. It was an AI and manufacturing offer: an open-source community, smart factories, a cloud platform, special economic zone partnership. Those tools also run on the minerals Modi was talking about. A smart factory still needs magnets, copper and battery metals. An open-source model still needs chips that themselves need processed rare earths. The two speeches can be read as complementary. They can also be read as a polite disagreement about who holds the chokepoint.

After Rio last year, Modi had said no country should use critical minerals "for its own selfish gain or as a weapon against others." Sunday's line was shorter and was delivered with Xi in the same frame. That is the information gain from this summit day: the warning is now on the record in the host's closing session, not only in a bilateral or a press note.

What happens next is bureaucratic. Indian officials will take paragraph 67 into working groups on logistics and supply chains that already exist on paper. China will take the chair in 2027 and will be able to rewrite emphasis if it wants. Between those two points, companies in Pune, Chennai and Gujarat will keep trying to book non-Chinese feedstock. The speech does not change their purchase orders. It tells them the prime minister is prepared to say the quiet part in front of the supplier.