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Australia to exclude India from quadrilateral under Chinese pressure |
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The US-Japan-Australia-India quadrilateral has hit a new hurdle. During the first strategic dialogue between Australia and China during the week, Canberra assured Beijing that it would exclude India from its long-standing trilateral strategic discussions with the US and Japan. Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith gave this assurance to his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi during their first bilateral strategic dialogue held in Canberra on Feb.5. Smith said after meeting with Yang that one of the things that caused China concern last year was a meeting of trilateral strategic dialogue plus India. “We are not proposing to have a dialogue along the lines as occurred last year”, he said.
The Australian media also quoted Smith as saying during his recent visit to China that Australia will keep the dialogue going with Washington and Tokyo but wants to keep India out. During his visit to China and Japan recently, Smith also informed both countries that Australia would not be attending any more of the four-way meetings.
China had expressed its unhappiness last year at Japan’s move to expand the dialogue to include India. The opposition to the “quadrilateral”, a grouping that was enthusiastically embraced by former Prime Ministers Sinzo Abe and John Howard, was expected to heighten under both Yasuo Fukuda and Kevin Rudd. Now, the Australian decision to tilt openly towards Beijing will have inevitable consequences in New Delhi, said sources.
Only recently, the Howard Government’s decision to sell uranium to India was revoked by the new dispensation in Australia. It was made amply clear to Shyam Saran, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy on the nuclear deal, during his recent talks in Australia to lobby for support at the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group.
The quadrilateral has been widely criticized in India by the CPI[M], an ally of the Government. It not only opposed the talks held last summer particularly after China officially demarched all the four countries but also vehemently opposed the maritime exercises between the four countries and Singapore in the Bay of Bengal in September. While China did not officially react to the exercise, it did not go unnoticed that soon after, China, Australia and New Zealand had their own exercises.
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