The Bicycle Lens: How Western Media Recycled Poverty Tropes to Frame India’s BRICS Summit

When an ordinary two-wheeler becomes the visual shorthand for a geopolitical summit, the question is not whether the photograph is real, but why that particular India is repeatedly chosen to represent the story.

The 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi was not a minor diplomatic gathering. Leaders of an expanded grouping representing nearly half of humanity met amid wars, trade tensions, energy insecurity and growing demands for reform of global institutions. The summit concluded with the New Delhi Declaration and discussions spanning trade, cross-border payments, energy, artificial intelligence, health, food security and reform of international governance.

Yet alongside this substantive geopolitical story emerged another, quieter narrative: the India selected for the photograph.

Across international coverage, BRICS banners, giant summit displays and images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were repeatedly photographed against ordinary Delhi street life. Motorcycles, pedestrians, buses and workers appeared in the foreground or alongside the summit's visual branding. Reuters' own archive contains, among other examples, a man sweeping a road before a Modi-BRICS hoarding, a pedestrian crossing another Modi display, and summit signage photographed through a bus window.

The photographs are real. The people in them are real. The more interesting question is why this visual contrast remains such an attractive way of representing India to international audiences.

The Photograph Is Real. The Frame Is Still a Choice

Photography does not become propaganda simply because it depicts an uncomfortable reality. Nor should India's poverty, congestion, inequality or informal labour be hidden because the country is hosting an international summit.

But journalism involves more than recording what exists. It also involves selection.

A photographer chooses where to stand and when to release the shutter. A wire service decides which images enter its distribution system. A picture editor decides which photograph accompanies an article. A homepage editor determines which visual millions of readers see first.

That chain of choices matters.

The New York Times, for example, used a Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters photograph showing a person on a motorcycle passing a large floral BRICS display for its September 12 coverage of the summit. The article itself dealt with BRICS, Iran, energy prices and the strategic importance of having major non-Western powers at the same table. Yet the visual introducing readers to the event was an ordinary Delhi road user passing summit signage.

There is nothing false about that photograph.

But factual authenticity does not make visual framing neutral.

The Bicycle Lens

The issue can be understood as the “bicycle lens”: a recurring tendency to place India's geopolitical ambition beside imagery associated, consciously or otherwise, with economic modesty.

A cyclist passes an enormous international-summit billboard. A street worker sweeps beneath a political hoarding. A motorcycle moves past carefully constructed summit branding.

The composition creates an immediate contrast: power above, ordinary India below; geopolitical ambition in the background, everyday struggle in the foreground.

Not every editor selecting such an image necessarily intends this message. That distinction is important. But audiences interpret images through cultural associations, and editorial desks are not passive participants in that process.

In another setting, a bicycle can signify sustainability, healthy living, urban sophistication or climate-conscious mobility. A modest two-wheeler can simply represent an ordinary commuter.

Placed repeatedly against Indian symbols of geopolitical ambition, however, the same everyday objects can acquire a different visual meaning.

That is where representation deserves scrutiny.

India Through the Lens of Contradiction

International reporting on India frequently gravitates toward contradiction.

India has a space programme, but poverty exists.

India is a major economy, but informal workers remain visible.

India hosts world leaders, but people ride bicycles.

India builds digital infrastructure, but inequality persists.

Every individual observation can be true. The problem begins when the contradiction itself becomes the default narrative architecture through which the country is understood.

A society of more than 1.4 billion people will inevitably contain radically different realities simultaneously. Modernity does not arrive by eliminating bicycles, street vendors or informal employment. Nor does geopolitical influence require every citizen to display middle-class Western consumption patterns.

The assumption that visible economic modesty somehow punctures India's international ambitions therefore reveals a remarkably narrow definition of development.

The Data Complicates the Old Picture

India continues to face significant inequality and developmental challenges. Serious journalism should examine them.

But India's economic transformation is equally real.

World Bank estimates show a dramatic decline in extreme poverty. Using its revised methodology, the Bank estimated India's extreme-poverty rate at 16.2 percent in 2011-12 and 2.3 percent in 2022-23. Its April 2026 India Development Update put the comparable figure at about 2.6 percent for 2023-24.

That does not mean poverty has disappeared. It means that an international visual vocabulary dominated by static images of deprivation increasingly struggles to represent the complexity of contemporary India.

The country can simultaneously contain poverty, rapid economic growth, enormous infrastructure investment, informal labour, sophisticated digital systems and world-class technological capabilities.

Those realities are not mutually exclusive.

When the Summit Disappears Behind the Street Scene

The visual question becomes more consequential because of what BRICS itself represented.

The expanded grouping now accounts for nearly half the world's population, while debates at the New Delhi summit included international institutional reform, local-currency trade, cross-border payment mechanisms, energy cooperation and geopolitical conflicts.

India's own approach was also more complicated than an anti-Western caricature. New Delhi sought to use BRICS as a Global South platform while maintaining strategic autonomy and avoiding its transformation into a rigid anti-Western alliance.

That is a substantive geopolitical story.

Yet a reader encountering repeated billboard-and-street-life photographs can receive a parallel visual message before reading a single paragraph: here is an emerging power, but remember the India underneath.

Visual framing operates precisely because it does not need to make the argument explicitly.

A Familiar Problem in a New Form

India's sensitivity to such imagery also has historical context.

For decades, international representations of the country disproportionately relied on recurring symbols: cows, snake charmers, slums, overcrowded trains, barefoot children and chaotic streets. India certainly contained all of those realities, but their repeated selection transformed parts of Indian life into shorthand for the whole.

The imagery has modernised.

The snake charmer may have disappeared from the front page. In its place is a more sophisticated juxtaposition: gleaming geopolitical ambition contrasted against an ordinary road user or worker.

The aesthetic has changed.

The underlying temptation—to explain India primarily through contradiction—has not entirely disappeared.

The More Powerful Counter-Narrative Is Complexity

The strongest response to reductive international framing is not to pretend India's problems do not exist.

It is to refuse the false choice between India's achievements and its challenges.

A person riding a bicycle past a BRICS billboard does not invalidate India's geopolitical influence. A sanitation worker does not cancel the New Delhi Declaration. A street vendor does not negate advances in digital infrastructure, space technology or poverty reduction.

They are all India.

That is precisely why reducing the country to any one of them is inadequate.

The more revealing question is not whether Western photographers should stop photographing bicycles or workers. They should not.

It is whether international newsrooms are capable of expanding their visual vocabulary when covering a country whose economic and geopolitical reality has changed faster than some of the stereotypes used to represent it.

Beyond the Bicycle in the Frame

The BRICS Summit demonstrated that India increasingly occupies a complicated position in the emerging global order: a major economy, a Global South power, a strategic partner of the West, a member of BRICS and an actor determined to preserve its strategic autonomy.

That complexity deserves scrutiny rather than celebration.

But it also deserves representation.

When a recurring visual formula places Indian ambition against imagery easily interpreted as backwardness or deprivation, audiences are entitled to ask why that contrast remains editorially irresistible.

The answer may not always be conscious prejudice. It may sometimes be habit, inherited newsroom conventions or the simple appeal of visual contrast.

But stereotypes do not need to be consciously manufactured to survive. They survive through repetition.

India does not need Western media to hide its poverty, silence criticism or photograph only skyscrapers and summit halls.

It needs something much less dramatic: to be represented in its full complexity.

Because India is certainly the bicycle in the frame.

It is also everything the frame leaves out.