INDIA JOINING QUAD MEETING TO COUNTER CHINA ON LADAKH FRONT: KNOW MORE

(The Quiver) : External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar will participate in the 4th Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting on February 11 in Melbourne, along with the Foreign Ministers of Australia, Japan and the United States, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) informed on Wednesday.

Before the Quad Summit in the month of April-May this year.The Quad foreign ministers are meeting on Friday to operationalize the arrangements on Indo-Pacific, vaccine delivery ,critical and emerging technologies, and global security environment. In the Quad meeting to be held on February 11, S Jaishankar will be accompained by US Secretary of state Antony Blinken, Japanese foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and Australian Foreign Minister Marise Ann Payne .

Foreign ministers of Quad countries: Marise Payne, S Jaishankar, Antony Blinken and Yoshimasa Hayashi.

China will also join the meeting to strike the Quad partners over Taiwan and to remain unresponsive to fully resolve the May 2020 Ladakh stand-off with India. In the meeting the leaders deliberate on the Ukraine crisis and Chinese emerging proximity to Russia and its belligerence over Taiwan, the leaders will also discuss on building trusted supply chains for emerging and critical technologies like 5G, 6G, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. “Rather than debating on expansion of Quad, time has come to translate policies on ground. The time for symbolism is over, Quad needs to be actionable,” said a former foreign secretary.

After attending the Quad meeting, EAM Jaishankar will be holding bilateral discussions with his Australian counterpart with a possible meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison .

At the Canberra summit, the Quad ministers are expected to work out a policy to mesh the diplomatic bureaucracies of the partners as the latter poses the biggest hurdle to forward movement. “ It is one thing to make a statement on vaccines, but with the kind of political overtones vaccines have acquired, the Quad ministers need to identify who will make the vaccine and which are the countries that will be supplied to on a priority basis as per requirement,” said a former Indian ambassador to US.