Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the QUAD Leaders’ Summit in Tokyo on 24th May 2022. The quad summit is basically a union of ‘like-minded’ countries committed to the rules-based liberal order. The summit is considered very important as it has regional and global far stretching consequences. The latest summit is the fourth Quad summit and the second since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Various factors make this formation special, among those first is the formation of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and the second is the presence and participation of Australia’s newly appointed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. On top of these, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the different opinions of the participant countries on it is also another speciality. Even Though having differences in opinion about the Russian invasion, they unanimously agree with the stance against “any coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo” by China in the Indo-Pacific.
What is quad and when did it start?
Quad is a multilateral grouping of India, the United States, Australia and Japan with the aim of an open and free Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific region is a hub of maritime trade and naval establishments. Although unspoken, a hidden aim behind the grouping was to overpower China’s exponentially growing influence in this region. The quad or quadrilateral was formed immediately after the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean leading to massive destruction in not only South Indian states but also Andaman and Nicobar, India’s maritime neighbours like Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia as the countries India, US, Australia and Japan were working together to provide disaster relief to the affected regions as an international coalition.
Then Japanese PM Shinzo Abe brought the countries closer together and developed the concept. Later he discussed it with then Indian PM Manmohan Singh at the summit in December of 2006. Meetings were held in 2007 but didn’t release official statements and also lost their momentum after that. After a decade later in 2017 only it was revived. Then in March of 2021, the four countries with the Indian prime minister being Narendra Modi and his US, Japanese and Australian counterparts, being Joe Biden, Scott Morison, and Yoshihide Suga respectively held an official virtual quad summit and released a set of objectives in the name ” the spirit of the quad”.
Initiatives taken in the latest summit
The common position of all the four countries in the Indo-Pacific was articulated at the summit. In the 2017 revival of the quad, very important steps were taken, like the satellite-based technique to link the naval facilities of India, Singapore and south Pacific regions to track illegal fishing and shipping. At this latest summit, the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) and a 50 billion dollar plan to improve the infrastructure of the Indo-Pacific region over the next 5 years, were put forward. Also in the case of improving cybersecurity, quad countries have decided to improve the defence of their critical infrastructure by sharing threat information, identifying potential risks in supply chains for digitally enabled products and services, and leveraging collective purchasing power to improve the broader software development ecosystem.
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s take
“At the Quad level, mutual cooperation is encouraging a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific region, which is a shared objective for all of us,” Prime minister Modi said.”The Quad is moving forward with a constructive agenda for the Indo-Pacific region. This will continue to strengthen the image of the Quad as a force for good,” he added.
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