‘AUKUS’ TAKES ‘QUAD’ FOR BREAFAST

In the past, I had made some posts about the importance of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, QUAD in short, an umbrella security club sort of an arrangement that was built by Japan, Australia, India & the US, in order to oversea the autonomy of Indo-Pacific Ocean zone, in the wake of Chinese’s assertion over it for the past two decades. With the increased Chinese aggression over the land, India considered it to be a strong deterrent against that nation. At the time of my earlier posts, with Donald Trump as the US President, the QUAD was buiding up steam at the right earnest, later culminating  in the ‘Malabar Naval  Exercise’ jointly by the QUAD member nations in the middle of this year. 

All that has changed now. The US under Joe Biden now has demoted QUAD into a ‘cooperative effort on things like energy, people to people exchanges, infrastructure and supply chain resilience”, as announced by Ms Wendy Sherman, US Deputy Secretary of State at Delhi, lately. 

What brought about this change of plans? 

1. Subsequent to Biden taking power in US, the country’s policies shifted and it was felt that an informal alliance such as QUAD will not work effectively and it needs substance of power to work against China. So, they involved nuclear capabilities to deter China. The fact is America never trusted Indian nuclear endeavours and so, it joined up with its besty, the UK and of course, Australia to form Australia-United Kingdom-United States, AUKUS, an alliance for nuclear submarine capabilities in the Indo-Pacific Ocean zone. 

2. The Indo-American relationship was never made on strong rails. There continues to have mutual distrust in several areas between the two nations. India could never be a stooge of US as Pakistan had been and it is not expected that India will support every move of America. And, India continues to maintain very good relationship with Russia (whom the present US regime hates), including military dealings with it. 

3. The Biden-Harris duo have been directly and indirectly chiding India on the perceived erosion of its democratic values and the intolerant stand that Indian ruling dispensation has taken on other religions. 

4. Come to think of it. Isn’t there a racist angle in the formation of AUKUS? Japan and India are Asian nations and are not white controlled. Culturally too, the US is not comfortable to have intimate relationship with the Asians. 

All these must have changed the US perspective and it demoted QUAD into a social club for cooperatiion on developmental issues. 

Is it a setback for India? From the current foreign affairs perspective, it could be viewed as one. But India, with an external affairs policy that conceived initiatives such as NAM (Non Aligned Movement), it never tried to cosy up to US, UK etc, in the way these nations want the relationship to be (a la US-UK, US-Pakistan etc.) 

So, with the weakening of QUAD, India is back to fending for itself……