The 4th Quad foreign ministers' meeting in Melbourne last week saw Australia, Japan, India and the US reaffirm commitment to a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific with focus on expeditious delivery of vaccines, maritime rules based order, humanitarian assistance, counter-terrorism and efforts to counter disinformation.
Possibly for the first time, a Quad joint statement, issued after the meeting, specifically mentioned the Mumbai and Pathankot attacks while condemning terrorism and calling upon countries to eliminate terrorists safe havens. This was also the first time that a joint statement was issued after a meeting of the Quad foreign ministers.
There were differences over Ukraine with India expectedly reluctant to take any extreme position on the issue, given its close ties with Russia. The joint statement made no mention of the crisis even though concerns were expressed on the Russian military build-up in the meeting. Secretary of state Antony Blinken later warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could begin any moment.
When asked about India’s position, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said India had already spoken on the issue at the UNSC. As it had said in the security council, India wants legitimate security concerns of “all countries’’ to be addressed. “This meeting is focused on the Indo-Pacific, so I think you should figure out the geography there. And where we stand, our position on Ukraine, we have laid it out in public at the UN security council,’’ he said in response.
On China-Russia cooperation and what Quad was doing to counter it, Jaishankar said Quad was “for something, not against somebody’’. The Quad statement called for protecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all regional countries.
According to the joint statement, the foreign ministers denounced the use of terrorist proxies for cross-border terrorism and urged countries to work together to eliminate terrorist safe havens, disrupt terrorist networks and the infrastructure and financial channels which sustain them and to halt cross-border movement of terrorists.
On Afghanistan, they reaffirmed the UNSC Resolution 2593, passed under India’s presidency last year, that Afghan territory should not be used to threaten or attack any country, shelter or train terrorists, or plan or finance terrorist acts, with “such ungoverned spaces being a direct threat to the safety and security of the Indo-Pacific’’.
