The Quad: Joint Statements and Working Groups

From Tsunami Core Group to Leaders' Summit

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue traces its operational origin to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami response coordinated by India, the United States, Japan, and Australia. Formalized by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2007, the grouping lapsed after Australia's withdrawal under Kevin Rudd in 2008 and was revived at the senior-officials level in Manila in November 2017. The defining institutional leap occurred on 12 March 2021, when President Joseph Biden hosted the first virtual Quad Leaders' Summit with Prime Ministers Narendra Modi, Yoshihide Suga, and Scott Morrison. The Washington in-person summit of 24 September 2021 cemented an annual leaders' cadence, supplemented by foreign ministers' meetings (Tokyo 2022, New York 2023) and a growing network of senior-officials and working-group tracks.

Reading the Joint Statement Genre

Quad joint statements are negotiated documents produced through a sherpa process; each paragraph reflects line-by-line clearance across four MFAs. For India, drafting authority sits in the Ministry of External Affairs' Indo-Pacific Division, established in April 2019 under Joint Secretary–level leadership, with PMO oversight on summit-level texts. Three textual conventions repay close reading.

First, the ordering of partners. India insists on alphabetical sequencing (Australia, India, Japan, United States) in formal Quad outputs, a convention preserved across the 2021 Spirit of the Quad, the 2022 Tokyo Joint Statement, the 2023 Hiroshima Vision Statement, and the 2024 Wilmington Declaration. This signals coequal standing and avoids hub-and-spoke imagery.

Second, the China formulation. The Quad has progressively sharpened language without naming the People's Republic of China. The 2021 statement referenced a "free and open Indo-Pacific" and "rules-based maritime order in the East and South China Seas." The 2022 Tokyo text added opposition to "coercive economic policies." The Wilmington Declaration of 21 September 2024 explicitly referenced "destabilizing or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion" in the South and East China Seas — language India accepted only after extensive bracketing. The persistent absence of a direct China reference reflects an Indian red line preserving room with Beijing and BRICS partners.

Third, the delivery verbs. "We will deliver," "we have launched," and "we commit to" mark binding deliverables; "we welcome," "we note," and "we encourage" mark aspirational or unilateral national contributions repackaged as Quad output. Indian readers parse paragraph 14 of the Wilmington Declaration — the Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI), proposed by Modi and to be hosted by India in 2025 — as the genuine Indian deliverable, distinct from American-led tracks like the Quad Investors Network.

The Six Working Groups

The Tokyo Summit of 24 May 2022 consolidated work under six pillars: (1) Health Security; (2) Climate; (3) Critical and Emerging Technologies; (4) Cyber; (5) Space; and (6) Infrastructure. The Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) initiative, announced at Tokyo, operates across pillars and channels commercial satellite tracking data to partners in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Indian Ocean — with the Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) at Gurugram serving as the South Asian node since its 2018 establishment. The Quad Vaccine Partnership, launched at the March 2021 summit to deliver one billion Johnson & Johnson doses produced by Biological E in Hyderabad, illustrates the model: Indian manufacturing, Japanese and American finance, Australian logistics. Subsequent supply-chain shocks reduced delivery to roughly 400 million doses by 2023, a gap rarely acknowledged in joint texts.

What India Will and Will Not Say

India's positioning within the Quad is governed by three doctrinal anchors. The first is strategic autonomy, articulated by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in The India Way (2020) and reiterated in his September 2022 statement that "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems." The second is the non-alliance principle, repeatedly affirmed by Foreign Secretaries from Vijay Gokhale to Vinay Kwatra: the Quad is described in Indian readouts as a "plurilateral" or "like-minded grouping," never as an alliance, bloc, or security architecture. The third is the development-first framing: India consistently elevates vaccine, climate, infrastructure, and emerging-technology deliverables over military interoperability language.

Track the gap between Quad joint statements and MEA's independent readouts to locate Indian limits. The MEA press release following the 3 March 2023 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in New Delhi referenced "respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity" — a formulation India also applies to Russia's conduct in Ukraine only obliquely — but omitted the joint statement's references to "militarization of disputed features" and DPRK ballistic missile launches. The asymmetry is deliberate: Indian readouts speak to a domestic audience and to Moscow and Beijing as much as to Quad partners.

The Malabar Question

The Malabar naval exercise, initiated as a U.S.-India bilateral in 1992 and expanded to include Japan permanently in 2015 and Australia in November 2020, is frequently conflated with the Quad in foreign press coverage. New Delhi rejects this conflation. MEA spokespersons — from Anurag Srivastava to Randhir Jaiswal — consistently state that Malabar is a naval exercise among four navies and "separate from" the Quad. The distinction matters: treating Malabar as a Quad military arm would breach the non-alliance line and invite Chinese characterization of the Quad as an "Asian NATO," a label External Affairs Minister Jaishankar explicitly rejected in Tokyo on 8 March 2023.

Forward Indicators for 2025

The 2025 Quad Leaders' Summit, scheduled to be hosted by India, will test several readings. Watch for: (1) whether the joint statement adopts a standing Indian Ocean Region paragraph distinct from the Indo-Pacific framing, signaling Indian agenda-setting; (2) whether MAITRI graduates from announcement to operational launch with a published curriculum and host institution — likely the Indian Navy's training establishments at Kochi or the National Maritime Foundation; (3) whether semiconductor and critical-minerals language hardens from the 2023 Quad Investors Network framework into binding supply-chain commitments; and (4) whether Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, or Maldives appear as named beneficiaries of Quad infrastructure or HADR projects, signaling convergence with Neighbourhood First.

The second Trump administration's posture, articulated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the 21 January 2025 Quad Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Washington — the first multilateral meeting of the new administration — preserved the Quad framework while shifting emphasis toward critical technology and supply chains. Indian commentators in The Hindu and Indian Express read the Washington readout as confirmation that the Quad survives American administration changes — a durability test the grouping has now passed twice.