India & Indo-Pacific

Story hook

It is 24 September 2021. PM Modi sits next to Biden, Suga, and Morrison at the first in-person Quad Leaders' Summit in the White House. Behind closed doors, AUKUS has just been announced 9 days earlier — a trilateral nuclear-submarine pact between US + UK + Australia that cancelled Australia's USD 65 billion French Barracuda contract.

The optics matter: Quad and AUKUS are NOT the same. AUKUS is a hard-security alliance; Quad is a "diplomatic network" — India + Japan are explicit that Quad is not NATO-Asia. And yet, both architectures emerged because of a single strategic problem: China's South China Sea militarisation + Taiwan Strait coercion + Galwan Valley incursion.

Four years on, Quad is institutionalised with annual leaders' summits (Tokyo 2022, Hiroshima 2023, Wilmington 2024, India 2025), Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) as a flagship, the "Squad" (US + Japan + Australia + Philippines) emerging as a sub-grouping, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) as the economic anchor.

For UPSC, this is the single most-tested Indo-Pacific architecture — Mains GS-II in every recent cycle.

Why this matters for UPSC

For UPSC:

• Prelims: Quad members (US + Japan + Australia + India); AUKUS members (US + UK + Australia); Squad members; IPEF 4 pillars; Malabar Exercise origins (1992) and quadrilateral expansion (2020); IPMDA launched Tokyo 2022.
• Mains GS-II: Indo-Pacific construct vs Asia-Pacific; India's strategic autonomy + non-alignment 2.0; SAGAR doctrine; Free + Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP); Belt and Road counter-narrative.
• Mains GS-III: Critical + Emerging Tech (CET); maritime
  • cyber security cooperation; supply chain resilience.
• Interview: "Is Quad an alliance?", "Why isn't India in AUKUS?", and "What's India's red line in South China Sea?".