India and the Quad: India needs to be watchful of China - and the US

While the elephant in the room is surely China and the concern is counterbalancing, the Wilmington Declaration is not rooted in the language of conventional security indicators like military alliances but crafted in the language of non-traditional security indicators like health, climate change, sustainability and democratisation of global governance - in short, building a framework for global goods in the Indo-Pacific.

So, is this language of engagement that is short of entanglements ‘small beer,’ as sceptics point out, or is this an innovative script for regional cooperation with a difference? What do we read for India in this expanding canvass of engagement in the Quad?

Has India precariously, or rather boldly, managed to stay on the path of engagement rather than entanglements? Is this a moment to be read as a moment when India’s script of strategic autonomy has greater takers in the US or is this a moment of strategic placating as the US needs India, given its converging interest on China?

Can the Quad be a leveraging canvass for India to tease out its interests in areas of global governance, for instance in areas of reform of the United Nations Security Council and India’s pitch for a permanent seat?

Moving beyond scepticism

Since the Quad’s inception in 2007 and its resurgence in 2017, there has been a persistent debate on India’s role within the grouping. India is the only country, which, as sceptics argue, is not formally aligned and in many ways is the weakest link in the Quad.

In many ways, this assessment of the Quad comes from reading the Quad on principles like military alliances that are, in script and spirit, antithetical to why the group’s partners came together. The naysayers would say this is simplistic because at the end of the day, it is China and the militarisation of the Indo-Pacific that poses a significant threat to all the key partners - and that surely is the elephant in the room.

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And rightly so, too. But what is needed is to read and evaluate the Quad for the alternative script of cooperation that it is positing, centred on non-traditional issues of security like health, climate change, and digital infrastructure. The signalling is global goods, the translation is broadening the canvass of engagement.

It is clever crafting for sure - how else do you bring on board partners like India, which is reluctant to be a party to any military alliance. The framing is pertinent because it not only opens up space for bilateral security partnerships (for instance the 2+2 format for India), but also for cross-cutting engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ASEAN countries, which have been sceptical of the Quad.

What do we read for India?

The key point of emphasis for India has been engagement without entanglements. Scholars on foreign policy and grand strategy would broadly define entanglements as the pressure that a country feels to engage in a conflict because of an alliance.

The entanglement trap is rooted in an era of Cold War politics marked by bi-polarity and military alliances. However, both historically and in moments of critical geopolitical churning, India has refrained from the entanglement trap in its own national interests and, of course, to guard its own strategic autonomy.

For a rising power like India, the Wilmington script has two-fold implications: First, it provides India the wherewithal to buttress its claim as a moral power with the material capability to deliver. So the commitment to the Quad Cancer Moonshot Initiative and a grant of HPV sampling kits, detection kits and cervical cancer vaccines worth $7.5 million to the Indo-Pacific region needs to be read in the context of strengthening the mechanism for global cooperation on health security.

 

And so should the other key announcements like a new category of scholarships for students of the Indo-Pacific region (specifically for bachelors-level engineering programmes) or the commitment for the development and deployment of Digital Public Infrastructure.

Secondly, without the formal architecture of a military alliance and with China’s increasing footprints in the Indo-Pacific, India has also very strategically aligned with Quad initiatives like the Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission and the Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI) 2025.

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The common thread that runs through all this is the widening canvass of engagement, leveraging its interest vis-a-vis China, and more importantly, shaping the discourse on global governance and cooperation.

However, while the script sounds strategically pertinent, how this manifests in terms of bilateral engagements and beyond the Indo-Pacific needs to be seen, specifically given that India straddles both Russia and the US in the wake of the critical geopolitical churning.

Slippery terrain?

While there is the Quad on one end of the spectrum, there is a growing strategic partnership with the US on the other. From India’s standpoint, its need and push for collaborative engagement in critical and emerging technologies, defence and strategic partnerships, and reform of the United Nations Security Council are all on a positive spin.

For the US, while it sees India as a potential bridge-builder in the conflict in Ukraine, or an important alliance partner to counterbalance China, it knows that it is difficult to nudge India away from its script of strategic autonomy. There is also no denying the fact that the US and India have definitely elevated their engagement to the level of deepened strategic partnership bilaterally.

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So, what does India need to be watchful of? First, double talk on the engagement on foreign policy and the slippery terrain of domestic politics. Foreign policymaking and grand strategy in the US are more complicated, which means India needs to pay greater attention to the differing voices in the US foreign policy establishment itself. It goes without saying that we need to read the signals on the Pannun case summons.

Second, given statecraft and great power politics, India needs to watch how the US navigates India’s interests in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Rim Association region. While China is converging its interests, will the US still want an India with unfettered moral and material capabilities?

So, of course, one needs to be watchful of the US in India’s neighbourhood as great powers are never weary of covert/overt ways of power maximisation.

Shweta Singh is associate professor, Department of International Relations, South Asian University.