After no show in Talisman Sabre, India to send warships for Malabar drill off Australia amid uncertainty over a thaw with China

New Delhi has been exploring the possibility of reaching an understanding with Beijing for the disengagement of troops from the remaining face-off points along the LAC– in eastern Ladakh before the G20 summit on Sept 9, 10.

India will join Australia, Japan and the United States in the annual ‘Malabar 2023’ naval exercise this week, even as it refrained from participating in the multilateral ‘Talisman Sabre 2023’ military drill held Down Under last month amid speculation of a thaw in its strained relations with China.

New Delhi has been exploring the possibility of reaching an understanding with Beijing for the disengagement of troops from the remaining face-off points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) – the de facto boundary between India and China – in eastern Ladakh before the G20 summit on September 9 and 10. President Xi Jinping is expected to visit New Delhi to attend the summit that would be hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The two sides are also exploring the possibility of a meeting between the two leaders on the sideline of the BRICS summit at Johannesburg in South Africa from August 22 to 24 – just about a fortnight before the G20 summit in New Delhi.

Amid speculation over a Modi-Xi bilateral meeting in Johannesburg or New Delhi, India refrained from participating in the ‘Talisman Sabre’ military drill, which was hosted by Australia from July 22 to August 4. More than 34,000 military personnel from 13 nations, including Australia, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom, joined forces across the sea, land, air, cyber and space for the exercise, which was held amid China’s belligerence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Canberra has been repeatedly inviting New Delhi to send its military personnel and assets to take part in the war drill. When Modi hosted him in Ahmedabad, Mumbai and New Delhi from March 8 to 11, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had once again invited India to send military personnel to take part in the exercise Down Under.

New Delhi decided against participating in the exercise apparently to avoid rubbing Beijing the wrong way and creating hurdles in the process of bringing the ties between the two neighbouring nations back on track with the meeting between the two leaders, on the sideline of either the BRICS summit or the G20 summit or both. India’s military officials, however, observed the exercise, which was held in five states and territories of Australia for two weeks.

But the Indian Navy will send two of its warships – INS Kolkata and INS Sahyadri – to take part in the Malabar 2023 exercise to be held off the eastern coast of Australia. The navies of Japan and Australia and the US will also deploy warships for the drill. The US will also deploy submarines and surveillance aircraft.

India, Australia, Japan and the US in 2017 revived the Quad, ostensibly to build a bulwark of democratic nations to counter China’s hegemonic aspiration in the Indo-Pacific region. The four nations, however, refrain from linking the annual Malabar naval drill with the Quad, which they maintain is not a security coalition.

A source in New Delhi said that India decided to stay away from the ‘Talisman Sabre’, because it would have been its first participation in the drill and it had been reluctant to make a new move that could be perceived adversarial to Beijing. China deployed a surveillance ship off the east coast of Australia to keep watch on the multi-national drill.

The Malabar, on the other hand, has been going on for a long time and India, like the US, has been a regular participant in the naval exercise, the source pointed out, drawing a distinction between the four-nation drill and the Talisman Sabre. Australia had in 2017 joined Japan, India and the US for the Malabar drill amid the growing belligerence of China, not only in the Himalayas but also in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval last month had meetings with Wang Yi, the director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission, in Jakarta and Johannesburg on July 14 and July 24 respectively.

Wang was reappointed as the foreign minister a day after his meeting with Doval. The back-to-back meetings signalled New Delhi’s intent to work with Beijing to speed up the negotiation to resolve the three-year-long military stand-off between the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

New Delhi, however, is still not sure if it would be finally able to reach an understanding with Beijing and add new momentum to the negotiation process before the G20 summit and avert the awkward spectacle of the red carpet being rolled out for the Chinese President in New Delhi with the soldiers of the Indian Army resisting the aggressive moves of the communist country’s PLA along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

Modi and Xi had met at a seaside resort at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu in October 2019 for an “informal summit” – a sequel to the first such engagement that had been held at Wuhan in central China in April 2018.

They had held a bilateral meeting on the sideline of the BRICS summit in Brasilia in November 2019. The two leaders, however, had held no such formal bilateral engagement in 2020 and 2021, as the military stand-off along the LAC, particularly the clash at Galwan Valley on June 15, 2020, had brought the relations between the two nations to a new low.

They had also attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s summit at Samarkand in Uzbekistan on September 15 and 16 last year. But neither had they held any bilateral meeting on the sideline of the conclave. They, however, had exchanged courtesies on the sideline of the G20 summit at Bali in Indonesia on November 15 last year and, as recently revealed by Beijing first and then by New Delhi, had also spoken of the need to stabilise the India-China bilateral relations.

Though protracted negotiations led to the mutual withdrawal of troops by both the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA from some of the face-off points along the LAC, like Galwan Valley, the northern and southern banks of Pangong Tso, Gogra Post and Hot Springs, the stand-off could not be resolved completely so far.

The PLA troops deployed in Depsang, well inside the territory of India along the LAC with China, are still continuing to block the Indian Army’s access to Patrolling Points 10, 11, 12, 12A and 13.

A face-off is also continuing in Demchok. Beijing has of late been claiming that the mutual withdrawal of troops by the Chinese PLA and the Indian Army from Patrolling Point 15 (Gogra-Hotsprings area) in September 2022 marked the restoration of normalcy along the LAC in eastern Ladakh. China’s claim appears to be an attempt to subtly build up pressure on India to accept the “new normal” in Depsang and Demchok areas.