Quad to discuss ways to monitor China's activities in Indo-Pacific region

India’s Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) may be linked through satellites with similar centres in other nations soon in order to build a monitoring network, which will primarily track illegal fishing but will also be able to keep watch on China’s military activities in the Indo-Pacific region.

As the leaders of India, Australia, Japan and the United States are set to hold the second in-person summit of the Quad in Tokyo on Tuesday, they are likely to discuss a proposal to build a network linked through satellites to constantly monitor the Indo-Pacific region.

The monitoring network is officially being proposed as an initiative by the Quad to track illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU fishing). Sources in New Delhi, however, said that it could also double up as a mechanism to collectively keep watch on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy’s aggressive moves in the Indo-Pacific regions.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to join President Joe Biden of the US, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan in Tokyo for the summit of the Quad.

The IFC-IOR run by the Indian Navy at Gurugram in Haryana monitors piracy, armed robbery, contraband smuggling, IUU fishing, Irregular Human Migration and “other maritime threats” in the Indian Ocean region. It monitored 392 IUU fishing incidents in the Indian Ocean region in 2021 and 40 such incidents last month. It is likely to play a key role in the proposed monitoring network, which will also have similar centres run by other nations linked through satellites and will thus track illegal fishing across the Indo-Pacific region, sources in New Delhi said.

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The Quad was launched by India, Japan, Australia and the US to counter the expansionist aspirations of China in the Indo-Pacific region.

New Delhi in the past stonewalled the attempt by the US to turn the Quad into a NATO-like security alliance for the Indo-Pacific region, not only because it was reluctant to be part of a move overtly adversarial to China, but also because such a move would have had implications for India’s decades-old strategic partnership with Russia.

India insisted that the Quad should continue with its benign agenda, like supplying anti-Covid-19 vaccines to the Indo-Pacific nations, helping them build infrastructure and supporting their pursuit of economic development in order to stop their drift towards China.

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India, however, is not opposed to the Quad’s move to build a monitoring network to keep watch on the Indo-Pacific region, as it is being proposed with the professed objective of tracking illegal fishing. Japan and Australia and several other Indo-Pacific nations accuse China of using illegal fishing as means of asserting its expansive territorial claims in disputed waters, be it in the South China Sea or in the East China Sea.

When Biden had hosted Modi and the then prime ministers of Japan and Australia at the White House on September 24 last year for the first summit of the Quad, the leaders had agreed to share satellite data for peaceful purposes, such as monitoring climate change, disaster response and preparedness, sustainable uses of oceans and marine resources, and on responding to challenges in shared domains.

Though the proposed network to monitor illegal fishing can also be put to use to monitor military activities of China, a source in New Delhi said that its professed objective at present was in sync with India’s own vision for Quad’s role in promoting a “free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific” and in upholding “a rules-based order in the region”, underpinned by “respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty” of all nations.