Ten member nations. Putin and Xi in the same room, with Iran and Gulf nation heads. An agenda heavy enough to nudge the global order. And yet, for a solid twenty-four hours, the loudest debate out of New Delhi’s Bharat Mandapam wasn’t Ukraine or the dollar or the oil that is on the boil. It was about poha and paneer.
Here’s how a buffet hijacked the summit.
The International Media Centre — where the world’s press set up camp — served an exclusively vegetarian spread. Poha, the works, not a kebab in sight. Then a photo of that green, meat-free tray went viral with a caption claiming it was the breakfast menu for world leaders. Cue outrage, memes, and a thousand hot takes from people who’d clearly skipped lunch.
Enter the MEA, fact-check locked and eyebrow raised. “Fake News!” it declared — no breakfast was served to leaders at the venue at all, and that viral tray was strictly the media’s. The dignitaries, it clarified, were dining at their luxury hotels, on elaborate regional menus that reportedly ran to kebabs and spiced walnuts. Translation: the press ate poha while the plot happened elsewhere.
Naturally, the discourse then climbed from the aam aadmi’s timeline to the political class. From the opposition benches, Trinamool’s Mahua Moitra mused, tongue firmly in cheek, about whether it’d be terribly un-MP-like to point visiting leaders toward the nearest Karim’s for a kebab run. Rahul Gandhi filed his own public reminder that most Indians eat non-veg, that it’s rather delicious, and that his sister’s chole bhature deserved an honourable mention. The treasury benches, meanwhile, let the millets do the talking.
Because here’s the sequel twist: the headline event — PM Modi’s gala dinner for the visiting heads of state — was, in fact, all-vegetarian. A millet-forward showcase engineered to sell India’s grain-of-the-moment to a captive room of presidents and premiers. Khandvi mille-feuille. Khumb galouti. Paneer lababdar. Millet pulao. Jalebi to seal the deal.
That fully-veg spread is where things got spicy.
One camp read the all-veg gala as a flex: heritage, hospitality and a health kick rolled into one confident plate, the host serving soft power a millet at a time. The other camp saw a curious call — a table for guests from ten countries where, in plenty of them, the grill is basically a love language — and asked where the tandoor went.
The irony writes itself. A bloc built on plurality, and the table only spoke one language: veg. At least for the cameras!
The declarations will be filed, the diplomacy dissected, the millets forgotten by Monday. But here’s BRICS 2026’s sweetest takeaway: park the most powerful people in one hall, and the internet still has just one burning question — where’s the non-veg?