The first multilateral meeting of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was QUAD with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya. The first bilateral meeting of the Trump administration was with India on January 21 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s special envoy Jaishankar was accorded top protocol at the Trump inaugural.
On January 26, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto will be the chief guest at the Republic Day Parade. He will be accompanied by Navy Chief Admiral Muhammed Ali for the three-day trip after Indian Navy Chief Admiral Dinesh Tripathi visited Jakarta last month. A 160 men’s tri-services contingent along with a 60-man band will also march on Kartavya Path on Republic Day.
Last September, the first woman US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti declared that America needs to militarily prepare for the China challenge on Taiwan in 2027.
While Indonesia wants to play the balancing role in the Indo-Pacific with the ‘Friends with all and malice towards none’ line, the geographical location of the fourth most populous country in the world places it in the midst of the Indo-Pacific. Indonesia sits on all the major ingress routes to the South China Sea with control over Malacca, Sunda, Lombok and Ombai-Wetar straits, stretching from QUAD partners India to Australia.
Join the three dots together and you get the big picture of the Indo-Pacific and the challenge faced by the rapidly expanding Chinese Navy. Even though the QUAD meeting in Washington was a broad overview, the meeting itself was a signal to the Indo-Pacific and all resident powers, particularly China.
China today has the largest Navy in the world with nearly 500 warships. The PLA Navy has cornered the majority of the Chinese defence budget for the past three years. For the first time, Chinese Defence Minister Dong Jun is an ex-Admiral of the PLA Navy. China has added a full Indian Navy strength of 135 warships in the past decade and today has a permanent presence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) with at least 6-7 warships in the littoral states at any given point in time. Chinese long-range carrier task force patrols are expected in the Indian Ocean Region as early as 2025 end.
Given the state of play, the QUAD summit may be hosted by India in the first half of 2025 even though the dates are still to be finalized. With trillions of dollars worth trade passing through the Indo-Pacific, it is important that QUAD plays a dominant role in the region to ensure freedom of navigation and keep the sea lanes of communication free of any big power coercion. In this context, the US will have to back Taiwan in a military emergency as annexation of the Island Republic will make the US, Japan and Australian military assets vulnerable to Chinese Navy expansion in the Indo-Pacific.
While Japan and Australia are close military allies of the US, the Indian strategic community but not the Modi government is split over New Delhi’s involvement in QUAD. The Left of Centre experts believe that India should not get caught in the war between the US and China and want New Delhi to forge ahead on strategic autonomy. This group of experts also believes that India should play a balancing role between the US and China and not let the rivalry play out in the Indian Ocean Region. The Right of Centre believes that India should join hands with the US and together meet the rapidly rising military challenge from the Xi Jinping regime or become a front-line state against Beijing in short.
Even though Indian and Chinese armies are facing each other in East Ladakh after the May 2020 PLA transgression and the PLA Navy is operating from key ports in the Indian Ocean Region, the current government wants bilateral ties with Beijing based on mutual respect, security and sensitivity. Rather than adopt a pro-China, pro-US or even pro-Russia stance, the Modi government is forging ties with big powers based on national interest with special inclination towards democratic powers like the US.
The need of the hour for the Modi government is to access the latest technologies from the US and rapidly expand India’s military-industrial base through domestic manufacturing under the “Atmanirbhar Bharat” rubric. During the bilateral meeting in Washington, Secretary Rubio indicated that the Trump administration will push the momentum on technology, defence and security ties, trade and commerce with India as domestic manufacturing is a key condition for the global high table. Until such time that India manufactures jet engines, fighters and submarines at home, the country will always be dependent on third powers for its defence and security needs. This month Indian Air Force Air Chief Marshal A P Singh red-flagged the HAL-DRDO for delays in meeting the first deliveries of 40 fourth-generation Tejas aircraft while China was already on the way to test the six-generation fighters. The fact is that the Indian Armed Forces and the Defence PSUs would rather buy foreign technologies off the shelf than rely on the Indian private sector through the “Atmanirbharta” route. The Indian civilian-military bureaucracy is equally responsible for this mess as it is focused on the process, not on results as a result of which it takes decades for a proposal to reach the decision stage. Remember, the Tejas program was conceived in 1984 and the first induction was in 2016. The Kalveri class submarine program was conceived in 1998 with the last of six submarines, INS Vaghsheer, commissioned by PM Modi on January 15. This dependency on hardware imports must go if India has to earn respect from global powers and prepare to meet rapidly rising China in the Indo-Pacific.
With PM Modi by far the senior leader of QUAD, the summit in India will define how democratic powers will tackle the emerging situation in the Indo-Pacific as well as build alternatives to support each other in technology, information, semiconductors and global supply chains. The Indian PM will get strong support from his close friend President Donald Trump, who revived the QUAD in his first tenure after China scuttled it in 2007.