PM Modi to leave for 3-nation tour on May 19

India, Japan, Australia and the United States have lined up “several deliverables” for the Quad Summit, which will now be held on the sideline of the G7 conclave in Hiroshima this week instead of Sydney in Australia.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Joe Biden of the United States, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia will hold the Quad Summit in Hiroshima. “There are several deliverables which we are expecting to come out of it and I think all that would be showcased when the four leaders meet in Hiroshima,” Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra said in New Delhi on Thursday. He was briefing media-persons about the prime minister’s visit to Japan, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

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Modi will leave New Delhi on Friday. He will first travel to Hiroshima, where he will attend the summits of the G7 and the Quad on Saturday and Sunday. The prime minister will later travel to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, where he will host the third summit of the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation (FIPIC) on Monday. He will also hold a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. He will then travel to Sydney where he and Albanese will hold a bilateral meeting and jointly address a conclave of Indian citizens living in Australia as well as citizens of Australia with roots in India.

The Quad Summit was scheduled to be held in Sydney on May 24 next. But Albanese had to call it off after Biden pulled out of it as he would have to return to Washington D.C. after attending the G7 summit in Hiroshima to continue the discussion with the US Congress leaders on a deal to raise the debt ceiling in order to avoid a default that could be disastrous for the global economy.

With Modi, Biden and Albanese attending the G7 Summit to be hosted by Kishida, the four nations now decided that their leaders would meet for the Quad Summit in Hiroshima itself.

“When the four Quad leaders meet, it is a Quad Summit,” Kwatra said on Thursday. He was replying to a journalist who asked him if the meeting on the sideline of the G7 conclave should be treated as an ‘informal meeting’ or a ‘regular summit’.

The leaders of the Quad are meeting in Hiroshima amid China’s growing belligerence, not only along its disputed boundary with India in the Himalayas but also in the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Quad is a four-nation coalition launched in 2007 and revived in 2017 to counter China’s expansionist moves in the Indo-Pacific. It was elevated to the level of the leaders in April 2021, when the leaders of the four nations had held a virtual meeting. They later had summits in Washington D.C. in September 2021 and in Tokyo in May 2022.

India, however, resisted the US attempt to turn it into a security alliance as it was not keen to remain in a group overtly adversarial to China. The Quad, unlike the AUKUS initiative by Australia, the UK and the US, continued with its benign agenda to counter Beijing’s bid to spread its influence in the Indo-Pacific. The four-nation coalition thus remained focused on development partnerships and cooperation in education and healthcare.