Opinion: Ship Repair To Disaster Relief, Key Maritime Takeaways That Can Help India Set Quad Agenda As 2025 Host

File image of the Quad Leaders’ Summit that was held in September 2024 at Wilmington, Delaware, US.

Source : PTI

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) — a regional grouping comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States of America — met in January 2025 for its Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue. This meeting came close on the heels of the Quad Leaders’ Summit that was held in September 2024, along the sidelines of the United Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA), at Wilmington, Delaware, in the United States. The 2025 meeting was consequential for it gave a message of strategic continuity, as this interaction, like its previous editions, saw deliberations on key traditional and non-traditional issues that have come to govern/inform the Indo-Pacific security architecture. 

However, in effect, it was the 2024 Wilmington Summit that provided the strategic subtext that furthers our understanding of the Quad’s aims and objectives, as this coalition has transitioned from a consultative mechanism into a leader-level-format summit that has come to shape the strategic discourse in the Indo-Pacific. The Wilmington Summit also enabled the Quad to convert its soft balancing approach (seen through official-level talks, joint and combined exercises) into a hard balancing approach that could challenge the revisionist intent of certain powers. This hard balancing approach could include the scaling up of military exercises to improve operational readiness in the future in diverse scenarios. In such a scenario, India could use the upcoming 2025 Quad summit to shape the environment to deter the adversary and build collective competence through engagement in capacity-building and capability enhancement. 

Focus On The Maritime Domain 

The Quad, in 2024, envisaged a union of maritime multilateral constructs in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), within the larger Indo-Pacific, by reaffirming the grouping’s support to regional constructs dotting the region such as the Association of South East Asian Nation (ASEAN), Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). This provides India an opportunity to view the entire Indian Ocean Region as a seamless and uniform geographical entity. This idea finds resonance in the Indian notion of viewing the entire Indo-Pacific as India’s strategic geography, and enables India to shape the strategic discourse on the Quad. 

When seen in conjunction with the 2022 and 2023 summit declaration(s) that focused on the Quad’s potential congruence with the ASEAN, the IORA, and the PIF, the 2024 summit reinforced the ‘centrality of the seas’ in shaping the quotidian discourse in the Indo-Pacific. This understanding came at a time when potential revisionist states such as China are attempting to upend the existing rules-based order and change the status quo ante. The Quad Maritime Legal Dialogue, in this regard, could be used as a platform to enforce the significance of the rules-based international order. Similarly, Indian legal practitioners along with their other Quad counterparts could come together to create a mutually acceptable glossary of terms to explain what the Quad views as potential transgressions within its area of influence. 

The Quad had earlier emphasised that Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) will be a key area of activity for the alliance. Since the Quad had first come together to provide succour during the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, the focus on HADR within the evolving construct of the Quad is a natural development with the ‘Quad Partnership on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief’ in the Indo-Pacific. This emphasis on HADR was followed by the creation of suitable “guidelines”, so that the Quad partners could adhere to them when conducting HADR operations. India could potentially strengthen these guidelines by consulting the guidelines issued by the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) to further the Quad’s operational capabilities. These guidelines could also“strengthen coordination and improve interoperability and operational synergy between countries during disaster responses”.

Operationalisation Of The Quad

At an operational level, the focus on HADR within the Quad has found expression in the conduct of the HADR Table Top exercises held in India in 2022 and Australia in 2023. In this regard, advancement in HADR operations can happen through further practice on the field that will allow the Quad to see its HADR framework in action. An opportunity is likely to be seized on the sidelines of Exercise MALABAR, which has, since 2020, practically become a combined exercise comprising the Quad.

In addition, training of personnel on existing hospital ships and their potential acquisition by individual Quad navies could further strengthen HADR practices. For instance, India could invest in suitable platforms — utility helicopters, landing platform helicopters (LPHs) and Landing Platform Docks (LPDs) — to aid its HADR missions. If economically viable, India could also acquire Multi-Role Supply Ships (MRSS) with HADR contingency load-outs that include deployable shelter systems and relief supplies.

The Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) has come to offer integrated maritime domain awareness/maritime situational awareness to partners in the region. Since the MDA is not simply about information and knowledge-sharing but essentially about developing a “comprehensive understanding” of the maritime domain — that is, making sense of activities related to the maritime domain as it comprises the engine room of nation and regional maritime security — it can harness trust-building between Quad partners. This is where India can use its good offices through the Gurugram-based Information Fusion Centre in the Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) to broaden and deepen information-sharing in the maritime domain. Furthermore, the India-initiated/led ‘Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI)’ will support IPMDA efforts and other “Quad partner initiatives”. India has taken a prudent step in this regard by opting to host the inaugural MAITRI workshop in 2025.

On cable connectivity and resilience, the Quad partners are working bilaterally to strengthen the quality of undersea cable networks present in the Indo-Pacific. For example, Australia has launched its own ‘Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre’, and Japan has attempted to improve ICT

infrastructure management capacity for an undersea cable in Nauru and Kiribati in recent months. In this regard, the Quad, especially India, could facilitate international cooperation in ensuring undersea cable repair (both in the realm of telecom and power cables) in the region through the creation of a specialised institute in South Asia/Indian Ocean Region that could train specialists. 

Such an initiative can also be replicated in the domain of ship repair. While bilateral initiatives within the domain of ship repair have become a constant, with the United States using the good services of both India and Japan separately to maintain specific vessels (on deployments) in the Indo-Pacific, India could endorse the creation of a working group on ship repair within the Quad. Such an endeavour could facilitate greater cooperation and collaboration among Quad partners in the coming years. 

Ultimately, since India is poised to host the 2025 dialogue edition of the Quad, Delhi should leverage these takeaways from the maritime domain to set the agenda of the next meeting, in a bid to strengthen the burgeoning Indian footprint within the Quad.

Anuttama Banerji is a Research Associate at the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi. She is also a former South Asia Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center in the United States.

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