India Hosted BRICS, and Western Media Reached for Bicycles, Labourers and Old Racist Stereotypes
India is hosting BRICS 2026 at a moment when the country is no longer merely asking for a seat at the global table. It is increasingly helping shape the table itself. The summit represents a grouping that now speaks for a substantial part of the world’s population and economic output, while India arrives as one of the world’s largest economies, a major technological and space power, an expanding manufacturing base and an increasingly influential diplomatic player.
Yet look at how sections of the international media have chosen to photograph this moment.
Again and again, the composition is astonishingly similar. A large BRICS hoarding stands in the background. Prime Minister Narendra Modi or India’s summit messaging dominates the billboard. Then, carefully occupying the foreground, comes a cyclist, a labourer, an elderly pedestrian, a worker pushing equipment or, in one particularly crude example, a man sleeping beneath the hoarding.
One photograph might have been coincidence. Two might have been dismissed as a photographer’s preference. But when the same visual language appears repeatedly across international coverage, it stops looking accidental.
This is racist visual framing. It is the old colonial gaze repackaged for the age of digital journalism.
Too Consistent to Pretend It Is Coincidence
Nobody is arguing that photographers should hide poverty or pretend every Indian lives inside a glass skyscraper. India has poverty. India has inequality. India has labourers, street vendors, cyclists and people struggling to make ends meet, just as wealthy countries have homelessness, deprivation and working-class communities of their own.
That is not the issue.
The issue is selection.
A photographer covering India can point a camera almost anywhere. Modern Indian cities contain metro networks, expressways, airports, technology parks, financial districts, electric vehicles, universities, start-ups, factories, shopping districts and millions of young professionals. The same country whose workers are cycling to work is launching spacecraft, building digital infrastructure and negotiating with the world’s largest powers.
Yet when India hosts BRICS, sections of the international media somehow keep rediscovering precisely the Indians who allow them to create the oldest visual cliché in their cupboard: ambitious India in the background, poor India in the foreground.
That is not neutral documentation. Photography is an editorial decision. Framing is an editorial decision. Choosing one person, one street corner and one angle from thousands of alternatives is an editorial decision.
And when those decisions repeatedly produce the same stereotype, the stereotype becomes the editorial message.
The Colonial Gaze Never Really Disappeared
For generations, much of the Western world’s visual understanding of India was constructed around a familiar collection of images: poverty, crowded streets, cattle, barefoot children, holy men, manual labour and exotic disorder.
India could change, but the camera apparently did not have to.
Today, India can build sophisticated infrastructure, operate one of the world’s largest digital payment ecosystems, land spacecraft on the Moon, manufacture advanced technology and command a growing role in international affairs. Yet whenever the country becomes too confident, too visible or too difficult to fit inside the old hierarchy, sections of global media seem almost compelled to rediscover that familiar India of their imagination.
The message contained in the BRICS photographs is hardly subtle. The billboard says global power. The foreground is selected to whisper: not so fast, look at the real India.
That is precisely what makes the imagery so patronising. The poverty or working-class subject is not merely being documented. He becomes a visual device for cutting India’s ambitions down to size.
From the Cow to the Bicycle, the Stereotype Barely Changes
We have seen this before.
When India’s Mars achievement captured global attention, the New York Times published its infamous cartoon showing an Indian farmer with a cow at the door of the so-called elite space club. India had accomplished something extraordinary in space exploration, and somehow the visual shorthand chosen to represent the country was once again a farmer and a cow.
Now look at the BRICS imagery.
The cow has been replaced by bicycles. The farmer has become a labourer. The elite space club has become the global diplomatic stage. But the underlying instinct remains remarkably familiar.
India achieves something significant, asserts itself internationally or enters a space once dominated by established powers, and somebody reaches for an image designed to remind the audience that this is still the land of poor farmers, workers and bicycles.
Different props. Same condescension.
That is why dismissing the criticism as oversensitivity misses the point entirely. Racism does not always arrive screaming racial abuse. Sometimes it appears through the repeated selection of stereotypes until an entire country is reduced to the characteristics through which outsiders have historically chosen to view it.
There Is One Problem: India Is Proud of Its Workers
There is also something almost comical about the attempted humiliation because it fundamentally misunderstands India.
If somebody thought putting a labourer in front of a BRICS billboard would embarrass Indians, they have badly misread the country.
We are proud of that labourer.
We are proud of the daily-wage earner who leaves home every morning to provide for his family. We are proud of the construction worker who helped build the roads, airports and cities through which visiting foreign correspondents travel. We are proud of the man riding his bicycle to work because he is earning an honest living.
Our workers are not your symbols of shame.
Our daily-wage earners are not props for your colonial nostalgia.
There is nothing humiliating about honest labour. The insult exists only in the mind of someone who assumes that placing a working-class Indian beside an image of India’s international ambitions somehow diminishes those ambitions.
In fact, it does the opposite. India’s rise belongs as much to the worker on the bicycle as it does to the engineer designing a rocket, the entrepreneur building a company or the diplomat sitting across a negotiating table.
If the purpose of these compositions was to embarrass India, they failed. What they expose instead is the prejudice of those who apparently regard an honest working-class Indian as something embarrassing enough to be weaponised against his own country.
India Has Changed. The Gaze Needs To
India does not need sanitised photography. It does not need foreign journalists to conceal its problems, and it certainly does not need propaganda masquerading as journalism.
But neither does it need to meekly accept racist stereotypes simply because they arrive through an expensive camera lens and are published beneath prestigious mastheads.
Criticise India’s government. Examine its economy. Report its poverty. Question its policies. That is journalism.
But when India’s global moment is repeatedly framed through the same tired imagery of poverty and supposed backwardness, Indians are entitled to call the bigotry by its name.
BRICS 2026 was supposed to provide the backdrop for a changing global order. Ironically, some of its international coverage has instead revealed how stubbornly parts of the old order cling to their view of India.
India has changed.
Its workers were never a source of shame.
Perhaps it is the global media’s gaze that now needs to catch up.
