India, Australia ink anti-terror pact

India and Australia on Monday agreed to boost counter-terrorism and defence cooperation, even as they called for a rule-based order in the Indo-Pacific amid China’s aggressive posturing in and around the South China Sea.

A meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull was followed by six pacts, including one for cooperation in combating international terrorism and transnational organised crimes.

They also agreed to speed up the much-delayed negotiations on the proposed Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement. “The prime minister (of Australia) and I recognise that our future is deeply tied to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. We, therefore, agree on the need for a secure and rule-based Indo-Pacific,” Modi said at a joint media conference with Turnbull here.

They also underscored the importance of respecting the maritime legal order based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, tacitly nudging China to accept the ruling of the international arbitration tribunal that Beijing had no legal basis to its historic claims in the South China Sea.

The two countries agreed that the bilateral maritime exercise, first held in the Bay of Bengal in 2015 (AUSINDEX), will be repeated off Western Australia in the first half of 2018.

They announced that the first bilateral army-to-army exercise would take place in 2018. The foreign and defence secretaries of the two nations would meet soon in a new ‘2+2’ mechanism to build on the deep strategic partnership.

Modi and Turnbull asked the negotiators of India and Australia to schedule an early meeting on the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement.