Diplomacy usually smells like stale coffee and floor wax.
If you have ever stood in the press pen outside a bilateral summit room, watching a cluster of tired translators adjust their earpieces while security detail sweeps the hallway one last time, you know the truth about international statecraft. It rarely looks like the history books promise. There are no sweeping orchestral scores, no sudden flashes of lightning, and certainly no neat, cinematic resolutions. Mostly, it is men and women in dark suits sitting across polished mahogany tables, speaking softly while the rest of the world argues loudly outside. For a deeper dive into similar topics, we suggest: this related article.
Yet, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped into a series of tightly scheduled bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the BRICS summit, the quiet conversations happening behind those heavy wooden doors carried an urgency that standard diplomatic readouts failed to capture. According to reporting by The Hindu, these high-level pull-asides placed defence and security cooperation squarely at the center of India’s agenda.
On paper, that sounds routine. Dry, even. A bureaucratic bullet point buried beneath trade figures and climate pledges. To get more details on this topic, extensive reporting is available on TIME.
In reality, it is the story of how a nation tries to keep its lights on, its borders quiet, and its ships moving safely through contested waters when the old rules of global order are actively dissolving.
The Weight of a Spare Part
To understand why a twenty-minute handshake between leaders on the margins of a multilateral summit matters, you have to leave the conference hall entirely. You have to travel thousands of miles away, to a high-altitude forward post in the Himalayas at four in the morning, or down into the humid, grease-stained belly of a naval dockyard in Visakhapatnam.
Consider a hypothetical scenario—a composite drawn from the very real logistical headaches military planners face every single day. Imagine a squadron of fighter jets sitting on a tarmac in northern India. The pilots are trained. The fuel tanks are full. The radar systems are humming. Now, imagine a single hydraulic valve inside the landing gear assembly wears out, and the factory that makes that exact millimeter-precise component is located in a country currently locked in a grinding war, choked by international sanctions, or suddenly reluctant to export dual-use technology.
Suddenly, a multi-million-dollar aircraft becomes an extraordinarily expensive paperweight.
This is the invisible reality behind the phrase "defence and security cooperation." When leaders meet on the sidelines of summits like BRICS—an expanded bloc that now brings together major emerging economies from Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America—they are not merely trading pleasantries about shared values. They are auditing their supply chains against shockwaves.
For decades, India’s defence architecture leaned heavily on legacy partnerships, particularly with Russia, while gradually opening doors to Western suppliers and pushing fiercely for domestic manufacturing under its Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) initiative. That balancing act worked well enough when global supply lines moved smoothly. Then came the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Red Sea shipping disruptions, and sharpening great-power rivalries across the Indo-Pacific.
Overnight, what used to be a procurement strategy became a survival puzzle.
Why the Sidelines Matter More Than the Stage
If you watch the main plenary sessions of a BRICS summit, you see the grand theater of multipolarity. Leaders sit around a massive circular table, delivering carefully vetted speeches about reforming global financial institutions, boosting local-currency trade, and giving the Global South a louder voice. Those speeches matter, of course, because they signal where the geopolitical wind is blowing.
But the real work happens in the corridors.
Think of a multilateral summit like a massive family wedding where everyone has to smile for the group photograph, even if half the relatives are locked in property disputes. You cannot resolve a boundary tension or negotiate a sensitive intelligence-sharing pact with twenty microphones pointed at your face and rival nations taking notes across the table. You step into a side room. You close the door. You talk directly.
The Hindu highlighted how Modi’s bilateral engagements on the BRICS margins deliberately prioritized security and defence ties alongside economic discussions. To see why, look at who sits inside that room now. With BRICS expanding beyond its original five members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—to include pivotal regional players like Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia, the summit has transformed into a rare diplomatic crossroads where rival power centers overlap.
For New Delhi, this creates both an acute risk and an extraordinary opening.
The risk is obvious. India has no interest in watching BRICS turn into an explicitly anti-Western bloc, nor can it allow its own core security concerns—such as cross-border terrorism and territorial integrity along the Line of Actual Control with China—to be brushed aside in the name of vague geopolitical solidarity. The opening, however, is equally compelling. Sitting across from counterparts from Eurasia, West Asia, and Africa gives India a direct channel to discuss maritime security in the Arabian Sea, counter-terrorism intelligence, joint military exercises, and co-production of defence hardware without filtering those conversations through Western capitals.
The Anatomy of Modern Security
Whenever officials use the word "security," most people immediately picture tanks rolling across plains or warships cutting through grey ocean swells. That mental image is at least thirty years out of date.
Modern national security looks much messier. It looks like a ransomware attack knocking out a regional power grid during a summer heatwave. It looks like a commercial cargo vessel carrying Indian fertilizer or crude oil getting targeted by a cheap drone hundreds of nautical miles from the nearest friendly port. It looks like encrypted messaging apps used by insurgent networks to coordinate smuggling routes across porous mountain borders.
When Modi and his counterparts sit down to discuss security cooperation, they are trying to stitch together a net capable of catching threats that do not wear uniforms or fly national flags.
Let us be honest about how confusing and unsettling this landscape feels, even to seasoned analysts. For years, conventional wisdom suggested that deep economic interdependence would naturally prevent major conflicts. Countries that traded together wouldn't fight each other. That theory shattered. Today, trade routes themselves are pressure points, semiconductors are strategic weapons, and defence agreements are as much about sharing software code and satellite imagery as they are about buying artillery shells.
In this environment, India’s approach—often described by foreign policy observers as "multi-alignment"—is frequently misunderstood by outsiders who prefer neat ideological boxes. Critics in Washington sometimes wonder why New Delhi maintains dialogue with Moscow or participates actively in BRICS while simultaneously deepening security ties with the United States, Japan, and Australia through the Quad. Meanwhile, commentators in Beijing or Moscow occasionally view India’s Western partnerships with suspicion.
From the perspective of New Delhi, however, there is nothing contradictory about it. It is pure pragmatism born of geography.
India shares long, contested land borders with nuclear-armed neighbors and sits astride some of the busiest maritime choke points on Earth. You cannot outsource your neighborhood. You have to manage it with every diplomatic tool available, talking to partners who might not even be talking to one another.
Memory as a Compass
History leaves deep grooves in a nation’s psyche, and India’s strategic culture carries the scar tissue of moments when external support vanished right when it was needed most.
Ask any retired Indian military officer about the 1962 border conflict, or the 1971 war, or the Kargil heights in 1999, and you will hear variations of the same hard-earned lesson. In a crisis, promises evaporate. Resolutions get vetoed. Embargoes freeze spare parts mid-shipment. The only deterrence that truly counts is the capability you control yourself, backed by partners whose interests genuinely align with yours when the pressure rises.
That historical memory explains why defence cooperation today looks radically different from the buyer-seller relationships of the past.
Twenty years ago, a typical defence deal meant India wrote a large check, and a foreign manufacturer shipped finished crates of hardware across the ocean. Today, New Delhi’s negotiators walk into bilateral meetings with a very different demand: build it with us, transfer the technology, and integrate Indian engineers into the supply chain.
Whether it is co-developing missile systems, maintaining naval vessels at Indian shipyards, or training partner militaries in counter-insurgency and maritime domain awareness, the goal is resilience. If a crisis erupts tomorrow, India wants to know that its defence ecosystem cannot be switched off by a single foreign parliament or a disrupted shipping lane.
What Happens After the Cameras Leave
Back in the summit venue, the photographers are ushered out after the mandatory thirty seconds of handshakes and flags. The heavy doors click shut. Outside, the news cycle moves on within hours to the next press conference, the next viral clip, the next economic forecast.
Yet the consequences of those quiet rooms ripple outward slowly, over months and years.
They show up when an Indian Navy destroyer conducts a joint anti-piracy patrol with a Gulf partner, keeping commercial shipping lanes open so that everyday goods reach port without massive insurance surcharges that quietly raise grocery prices for millions of families. They show up when intelligence agencies quietly share digital footprints that disrupt a terror financing network before a bomb ever reaches a crowded market. They show up when a young engineer in Bengaluru or Pune gets hired to design avionics software for a joint defence venture instead of watching that expertise flow overseas.
None of this makes for a flashy headline. Progress in diplomacy rarely announces itself with a trumpet. More often, success is measured by the crises that never happen—the ship that isn't hijacked, the border skirmish that gets defused before a shot is fired, the supply chain that bends under pressure without snapping in half.
Late at night, after the motorcades have cleared the streets and the summit halls stand empty, a single custodian pushes a buffing machine across the polished floor where the world’s leaders stood just hours earlier, erasing the scuff marks before morning.
