Australia’s Quad partnership with India, Japan and the United States is a key pillar in Australia’s foreign policy. The Quad is a diplomatic network of four countries committed to supporting a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient. It complements our other bilateral, regional and multilateral cooperation, including with ASEAN member states and Pacific partners.
The Quad has a positive, practical agenda to respond to the region’s most pressing challenges, including COVID-19 vaccines, climate change, infrastructure, critical and emerging technology, cyber security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, space, maritime security, countering disinformation, and counter-terrorism. Quad partners are steadfast supporters of ASEAN centrality, the ASEAN-led architecture and ASEAN’s Outlook on Indo-Pacific. The Quad’s origins date back to our collaboration in response to the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This Quad meeting not only saw Australia and India approach the dialogue with a similar strategy of building towards rather than containment of, but it also saw their shared perspectives, values and interests lead to favourable outcomes in the bilateral relationship.
A shared wariness over China:
Indeed, Australia and India have had much success in defence and security cooperation and diplomatic coordination in recent years. They have obvious overlapping interests here, principally the management of China’s assertiveness across the Indo-Pacific region. New Delhi’s concerns about China long predate Australia’s. The scale of the threat Beijing could pose to India is much greater, too.
In 1947, the British bequeathed independent India an unsettled northern border—a situation exacerbated by Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s invasion of the erstwhile buffer state of Tibet a couple of years later. Since then, China and India have watched each other warily and periodically come to blows. They had a border war in 1962, a large-scale confrontation in 1986-87 and a brief but nasty engagement in 2020. Since the 1962 border war, New Delhi has handled the potential threat with a mix of strategic partnerships with other countries and military power.
In 1971, India signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that gave it access to advanced defecse technology and Moscow’s diplomatic backing. Then, in 1998, as India watched Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s reforms work their magic on China’s economy, New Delhi acquired a nuclear deterrent as an added safeguard. And since the mid-2000s, India’s leaders have looked to new potential partners to invest in its economy, boost its military capabilities even further and bolster its regional influence. These include its partners in the Quad security grouping – the US, Japan, and Australia.