New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders attended a gala dinner hosted by India at Bharat Mandapam for heads of state and delegates attending the 18th BRICS Summit.
Hosting a gala dinner for visiting leaders is a long-standing custom at BRICS summits, with each year’s chair typically holding a formal dinner alongside the main talks as a venue for informal diplomacy and cultural exchange between member and partner nations. It follows a similar dinner India hosted for the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in May this year, and this year’s programme also drew on India’s culinary diversity, with an all-vegetarian, multi-course spread of regional Indian dishes served to guests.
Guests at the dinner included:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin
- Chinese President Xi Jinping
- Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian
- Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
- South African President Cyril Ramaphosa
- Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev
- Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto
- WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
From the Indian side, several Union Ministers and Chief Ministers also joined the banquet, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, Health Minister JP Nadda, and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, along with Chief Ministers Yogi Adityanath (Uttar Pradesh), Devendra Fadnavis (Maharashtra), Himanta Biswa Sarma (Assam), and Rekha Gupta (Delhi), among others.
The evening featured a special cultural performance titled “Navarasa – The Universe of Shared Emotions,” and the “BRICS Symphony – One Rhythm, Many Cultures,” a roughly 160-strong ensemble of dancers and musicians from India and other BRICS countries, performing classical dance forms including Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Kathak.