New Delhi: Will the second Quad ministerial meeting be held in India? While the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) briefing seemed to indicate that India would be the organiser, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar stated no decision was made yet on the location or date.
With the US, Australia, India and Japan have differing degrees of bilateral tensions with China, there has been a lot of interest in witnessing what shape the Quad will take in the current geo-political situation.
Last Monday, US deputy secretary of state Stephen Biegun had explicitly stated that the ministerial meeting of the Quad countries will be in India in October. “There’s going to be [a] meeting of the Quad, a ministerial meeting with the Quad this fall in Delhi – that’s the intention anyway – in person,” he said at the US India Strategic Partnership Forum on August 31.
The foreign ministers of the four countries had met for the first time in September 2019, which was a significant elevation of the grouping that had previously only met at the level of senior officials.
On Thursday, the MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava was asked whether India will be hosting a ministerial meeting. “Yes, we look forward to holding the meeting later this year,” he said.
While the Indian media reported that the MEA spokesperson had confirmed that New Delhi would host the second quad meeting, Jaishankar was more circumspect.
“We are talking of a Quad ministerial meeting. I don’t think we have made a decision on either the location or timing as yet,” he said at a live-streamed launch of his new book, organised by the Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation.
The Indian foreign minister’s statement may be a reflection of the situation about the Quad meeting, rather than the impression conveyed by the MEA press conference.
As per an informed source, the venue of the next meeting could be either Japan or the US – but there has been no final decision yet.
The Wire asked a diplomat of one of the Quad countries if their foreign minister would be visiting India. The senior official said there are no confirmed details of the circumstances of the Quad ministerial meeting. It was also pointed out that the MEA spokesperson’s statement had not been clear, as it wasn’t clarified if the phrase “holding” the meeting meant that India would ‘host’ the Quad foreign ministers.
In an article published in The Wire on July 28, RAND senior defence analyst Derek Grossman had written that while the Quad had so far resisted publicly from identifying China as its main target till now, it may not be so coy in the future. “For the first time in the Quad’s history, the stars are aligning for a harder line on China, and the implications going forward could be significant,” he wrote.
A “more openly anti-China Quad” may face resistance from other ‘Quad plus’ countries, who wouldn’t be keen to be part of an association that singles out China, noted Grossman. This could even push Russia, which is already wary of the ‘Quad’, closer to China.
However, Grossman argued, the aim of countering China would give a “concrete objective” to the Quad, which otherwise gives an impression to critics of a disjointed group with differing interests.