India hopes that the Quad will underwrite its Maritime Progress. Will It?
- Maryam Raashed
- Jun 22
- 5 min read
The Quad, often incorrectly yet famously known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is a grouping comprising the United States, Australia, Japan, and India. With its origins tracing to the Tsunami Core Group (TCG) formed in 2004, the purpose of the grouping is to coordinate in the domains of maritime security, supply chains, technology, climate, and humanitarian assistance, with the larger goal to promote a free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific.
While the grouping itself has never claimed to be a mechanism for countering China in the Indian Ocean region, however, its overwhelmingly militaristic approach has led it to be perceived, particularly in Beijing, as the ‘Asian NATO’.
Over the years, the grouping has increasingly come under question for its intent as well as its ability to serve as an effective framework to secure the Indo-Pacific region. Devoid of ideological or cultural uniformity or a formal alliance structure, the grouping is a loose consortium of four diverse strategic cultures. Also, coordination over non-traditional security issues, at the same time, there has been a slowdown in leaders’ summits as well.
Since its creation, only six leaders’ summits have taken place. More notably, no leaders’ summit has taken place since the beginning of President Trump’s second administration. Ministerial-level meetings on the other hand have been conducted relatively regularly, with the latest Foreign Ministers’ meeting being held in May 2026 in New Delhi—during the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to India.
The foreign minister’s meeting was to schedule the impending leaders’ summit, however, it could not. This is mainly because under the current Trump administration, the Quad playbook appears to have been recalibrated. While the current administration is majorly focused on the West Asian and South American theaters, it also seems to be less inclined to sustaining an Asian security architecture through an indefinite forward military dominance.
This has placed the onus on other members to build capacity independently while plugging into broader American-led balancing networks. Resultantly, Tokyo and Canberra have accelerated military modernisation efforts, with Canberra particularly intensifying its force integration, and operational coordination in the pacific.
Quite evidently, Quad’s journey has been one of fits and starts, and continues to be so. Interestingly, since long, New Delhi has been seen as the weakest link in the grouping. Reasons primarily include its long-standing preference for what it terms its doctrine of “strategic autonomy”, and its long-standing defence ties with Moscow. While it is viewed as the ‘civilisational other’, it is also suspected to be reluctant toward transforming the Quad into a formal security arrangement.
New Delhi is also perceived to be showing a preference for practical cooperation in areas such as maritime domain awareness, critical technologies, infrastructure, and supply chain resilience, rather than binding defence commitments.
Contrarily, within New Delhi, its inclusion in Quad is seen as the triumph of its ‘multi-alignment’ approach to foreign policy. Through Quad, India seeks to enhance its maritime domain awareness (MDA), strengthen freedom of navigation, and deepen cooperation in areas such as anti-piracy operations, surveillance, and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR). Collectively, these capabilities support New Delhi's ambition of positioning itself as a "net security provider" in the Indian Ocean.
Precisely, these are also New Delhi’s current maritime objectives as envisioned under its MAHASAGAR (Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions) initiative –an initiative aiming to expand New Delhi’s influence and offer it a leadership role in the Indian Ocean. From the get-go, the MAHASAGAR initiative presents itself as more than just a military strategy seeking the containment of Chinese influence.
Instead, it presents itself as an alternative to China's Belt and Road initiative, aiming to integrate economic diplomacy, technological connectivity, and environmental sustainability into India's maritime engagement with Global South littoral states. More simply put, unlike Quad – which New Delhi may grow to see as one instrument Washington’s Pacific strategy, the MAHASAGAR on the other hand is exclusively an Indian initiative, on India's terms.
However, while this is an attractive initiative conceptually, however practically, it requires financial capital and institutional capacity. As of now, the Indian Navy faces considerable capability gaps vis-à-vis its maritime ambitions. The Indian Navy indeed fields aircraft carriers (total two in numbers), destroyers, frigates as well as conventional and nuclear-armed submarines, whereas it is also planning new mega-port projects.
However, the magnitude of India’s current capabilities is not as much as to sustain operations far east of the Malacca Strait - not yet at the scale of a true Indo-Pacific power. Hence, closing the gap with China requires sovereign shipping capacity and large-scale naval modernisation.
This is where the Quad becomes increasingly crucial for New Delhi -for capacity and capability enhancement, as well as for securing resilient supply chains, and for gain access to critical and emerging technologies. Consequently, New Delhi is not just making efforts to operationally embed itself in Quad, but is also securing bilateral cooperative frameworks with the member states. However, hypothetically, if these gaps are abridged, even then, there remains an inherent contradiction in India’s China policy i.e. New Delhi exercises a great degree of caution when it comes to provoking escalation vis-à-vis China.
India is the only Quad member that not just shares a direct territorial border with China, but has also engaged in border stand offs. If anything, the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes and the ensuing border talks (that continued for over four years) explicated the necessity of institutionally-led escalation management mechanisms for New Delhi.
Perhaps, these factors have led Washington to rethink New Delhi’s place in its Pacific strategy. A few days ago, the U.S. administration announced to have reverted the name of its military command in the Pacific to the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM). While its earlier renaming as the “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command” in 2018 was viewed as a diplomatic gain for New Delhi, the removal of the term “Indo” likewise appears to symbolically downgrade its positioning as a central strategic partner in Washington’s regional calculus.
The renaming appears to be seeking to reduce India’s visibility in U.S. strategic vocabulary. The move has already come amid at strained U.S.-India ties. At the same time, it also indicates recalibration of U.S. priorities vis-à-vis China in the Pacific theatre, raising renewed questions about Quad’s future.
Nonetheless, cooperation amid quad members particularly on bureaucratic and institutional-level may continue amid fluctuating political alignments. In this case, New Delhi would continue its engagement with Quad to extract strategic and material benefits from mini-lateral and Quad-led bilateral cooperation. The larger goal for New Delhi would be to its homegrown maritime initiatives, rather than to become the linchpin of Washington’s Pacific strategy. However, broader cooperation may become episodic and exercise-based. As a result, Quad could complement India’s maritime ascent – albeit very limited, however, it may not substitute for the resources required to underwrite it.
This article written by Maryam Raashed, an Islamabad-based researcher currently affiliated with the Strategic Vision Institute.
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