Senior Officials Meeting one of several intense engagements between Quad countries this week, but it’s not a counter-China grouping
Shared concerns over China’s moves in both the Indian Ocean Region and the Pacific Island countries, as well as the situation in Sri Lanka, came up during the Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) of Quad countries, that ended on Tuesday in Delhi, diplomatic sources told The Hindu. The meeting, which reviewed projects agreed to by leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. during the Quad Summit in Tokyo this year, and set the course for a Ministerial-level meeting of the four countries, due to be held in India next year, also held discussions on Quad proposals like the vaccine initiative that has run into trouble over the past year, as well as cooperation on emerging technologies, infrastructure funding for Indo-Pacific countries. and projects to counter climate change in vulnerable regions.
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said in a tweet that the officials discussed: “regional & global developments, reaffirming their vision for a free, open & inclusive Indo-Pacific”.
Meanwhile, both S. Jaishankar and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong addressed the Delhi-based Australia-India Leadership Dialogue, an annual conference run by the Australia India Institute (AII), via video messages on Tuesday.
“The Quad has emerged as a key platform for ensuring progress, prosperity, stability and security. We are also engaged in advancing the realisation of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. And trilaterally, along with Japan, we are working on promoting supply chain resilience,” Dr. Jaishankar said.
The Minister said that it was in the “realm of politics and strategy” that the India-Australia transformation in ties has been the “sharpest” in recent years. “Much of the growing convergence has been driven by concerns about the region’s stability, prosperity and security,” he added in a veiled reference to tensions with China and concerns over Beijing’s growing influence in the island nations near India and Australia.
Earlier this month, India and the U.S. went head to head with China over the docking of its “research and satellite tracking” ship, the Yuan Wang 5, at Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port. Despite public appeals from both countries to the Sri Lankan government, however, the ship was allowed to dock and replenish stocks. In the Solomon Islands near Australia, the government, that has recently signed a security deal with China, denied docking permission for two international warships, the British patrol boat H.M.S. Spey and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Oliver Henry, who had to divert to other ports. According to officials, the Quad SOM, that was the first meeting of the grouping since the Taiwan crisis, spoke about the need to share information on possible security concerns in the Indo-Pacific maritime sphere, and “maintaining the rule-based global order”. However, the officials said that it was “erroneous” to portray their discussions as seeking to “counter or contain” China.
The sources said that problems for the Quad vaccine initiative, that had been announced in March 2021, were also discussed briefly. As The Hindu had reported in May 2022, the original plan to manufacture one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, including the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by the end of 2023, has run aground over India’s refusal to give an indemnity waiver for the American-developed vaccines, as well as shrinking demand for the vaccines as the Indo-Pacific countries have completed their COVID-19 inoculation schedules. Conceding the issues, an official present at the meeting said that the Quad SOM had discussed a repurposing of the initiative for cooperation in future pandemic situations. “The important point is to build joint capacity to deal with future challenges — in that sense are efforts have not been useless,” the official told The Hindu, on condition of anonymity.
The Quad SOM that took place on Monday and Tuesday was hosted by the MEA Joint Secretary (Americas) Vani Rao, and attended by delegations led by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Donald Lu; Japan’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Policy Keiichi Ichikawa; and Australia’s Deputy Secretary of the geostrategic group, who oversees the Indo-Pacific strategy division in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Justin Hayhurst.
The meeting was one of a series of engagements with India’s Quad partners this week, including an India-U.S. inter-sessional 2+2 meeting with diplomatic and Defence officials on Wednesday, and the visit to Tokyo of Dr. Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh for the India-Japan 2+2 Ministerial meetings from September 7-10.
“India-Japan Special Strategic and Global Partnership is based on shared values of democracy, freedom and respect for rule of law. During the visit, the two sides will further explore new initiatives to strengthen the partnership,“ the MEA said in a statement about the 2+2 in Tokyo.
“Through these dialogues, US and India will advance an ambitious set of initiatives across our defense partnership in support of information-sharing, logistics, technology, and high-end Navy cooperation,” said the U.S. Department of Defense, announcing the India-U.S. meeting in Delhi on Wednesday, which would be co-chaired by U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, Ely Ratner.
