India Invites Australia to Join Malabar Drill

NEW DELHI: India on Monday formally invited Australia to take part in its trilateral Malabar naval exercise with the US and Japan this year amid the ongoing military confrontation with China in eastern Ladakh.
The decision to include Australia in the drills — the first time all members of the regional grouping known as the Quad will be engaged at a military level — comes as Beijing and New Delhi are caught up in their worst border tensions in four decades.
The exercise will bring together the navies of India, Japan, Australia and the US in the Bay of Bengal at the end of the year.

“As India seeks to increase cooperation with other countries in the maritime security domain and in the light of increased defence cooperation with Australia, Malabar 2020 will see the participation of the Australian Navy,” the defence ministry said in a statement.
It said that this year’s drill has been planned on a ‘non-contact – at sea’ format.
“The exercise will strengthen the coordination between the Navies of the participating countries,” the ministry said.
It said the Quad nations are engaging to enhance the safety and security in the maritime domain.
“They collectively support free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific and remain committed to a rules based international order,” it said amid China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indian Ocean Region.
China had strongly objected to the India-US Malabar exercise in the Bay of Bengal in 2007 when it was expanded to include Japan, Australia and Singapore as well, firm in its belief that a multilateral naval construct was emerging to “counter and contain” it in the region.
This had led India to restrict Malabar to a bilateral one with the US for several years – Japan was included only when the exercise was held in the north-western Pacific in 2009 and 2014 – before finally agreeing to make Japan a regular participant from 2015 onwards.

India has traditionally been against any militarization of the Quad to avoid needlessly antagonizing a prickly China. Similarly, New Delhi has also made it clear the US should not “conflate” the Indo-Pacific with the Quad, stressing the centrality of Asean in the former.
With Australia’s inclusion, it will be a breakaway from the self-imposed restraint. India, of course, is bilaterally expanding its military ties with Australia.

“The timing of India potentially letting Australia into Malabar would be especially significant at this juncture,” Derek Grossman, researcher at the Washington-based RAND Corporation who worked in the US intelligence community for more than a decade, had said.
“It would send a significant message to China that the Quad — US, Australia, Japan, and India — are de facto conducting joint naval exercises, even if not technically conducted under the auspices of a Quad event.”

Source: ToI