China’s aggressive actions caused India to join Quad, says former US Secretary of State

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed that India, known for its independent foreign policy, was forced to change its strategic stance and join the four-nation Quad alliance due to China’s growing aggression.

This comes a day after reports emerged of Pompeo claiming that his then Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj told him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike in February 2019, and India was preparing its own escalatory response.

Pompeo, one of former US President Donald Trump’s most hawkish advisers on China, explained in his latest book how Washington succeeded in bringing India on board the Quad grouping after years of ambivalence from New Delhi.

“The country (India) has always charted its own course without a true alliance system, and that is still mostly the case. But China’s actions have caused India to change its strategic posture in the last few years,” Pompeo wrote in his recently released book ‘Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love’.

In his book, Pompeo traced the major events that led to a decline in India-China ties in recent years – from Beijing’s growing closeness with Islamabad, its Belt and Road Initiative push, border disputes that escalated to a showdown between Indian and Chinese troops at Galwan, and India’s retaliatory ban on dozens of Chinese apps like TikTok.

The Republican also blamed Covid-19, which he has referred to as the “Wuhan virus” in the past, for the souring of bilateral relations between the two neighbours.

“I was sometimes asked why India had moved away from China, and my answer came straight from what I heard from Indian leadership: ‘Wouldn’t you?’ times were changing — and creating an opportunity for us to try something new and pull the US and India more closely together than ever,” Pompeo writes.

He also termed India the “wild card” in Quad because it was a nation founded on socialist ideology and did not align itself with either the US or the erstwhile USSR during the Cold War.

WHAT IS QUAD?
The Quadrilateral Initiative – informally named the Quad – first began in May 2007 with a meeting between the US, Japan, India and Australia in the Philippine capital Manila.

The informal grouping, championed by Japan’s then prime minister Shinzo Abe, was viewed by analysts as an attempt to step up co-operation in the face of a rapidly rising China.

However when Beijing sent formal protests about the Quad, its members said their “strategic partnership” was only aimed at maintaining regional security and was not targeting any particular country. The Quad group then lost momentum.

Quad was revived in 2017, as Japan, India and Australia gave shape to the long-pending proposal of setting up the coalition to counter China’s aggressive behaviour in the resource-rich Indo-Pacific region.

Pompeo described the former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe as a global leader of extraordinary courage and vision. “[Abe] is regarded as the father of the Quad, demonstrating his foresight in viewing the CCP as a threat,” he writes.

Pompeo also praised former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for displaying courage and standing up against Chinese aggression.

The Japanese and Australian legs of the Quad were strong and getting stronger with our support, he added.

China has previously made clear its misgivings about the Quad grouping, warning against “exclusive cliques” that target third parties.