Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: The Quad foreign ministers give the grouping some forward momentum with a meeting in Tokyo, Bangladesh’s PR campaign falls flat in the wake of violent protests, and Pakistan asks major donors for debt restructuring as it seeks assistance from the International Monetary Fund.
Quad Foreign Ministers Meet in Tokyo
The foreign ministers of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—including Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—met in Tokyo on Monday, bringing a much-needed boost to a prominent and influential grouping that was facing uncharacteristically slow momentum.
The Quad emerged in 2004 around coordinated humanitarian assistance in the wake of the catastrophic Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that year. Soon after, a few members pulled back to avoid upsetting China. But the grouping has roared back to relevance in recent years because of intensifying competition with Beijing in the Indo-Pacific. High-level meetings and working group discussions have increased as members’ relations with China have hit new lows.
This year, the Quad has faced new challenges, not because of strategic considerations but rather competing obligations. Busy political calendars—including India’s six-week-long elections in the spring and the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign—have so far prevented an annual Quad leaders’ summit this year. The event was last held in May 2023 in Hiroshima, Japan.
India will host the next leaders’ meeting whenever it happens; it tried to schedule it in January, but U.S. President Joe Biden declined the invitation, possibly in part because of tensions over an alleged Indian plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist in New York. Senior officials from the Quad countries met via videoconference in early July, but otherwise there had been no formal high-level engagements this year—making Monday’s summit significant.
A joint statement issued after the meeting sent a clear signal that all is well within the Quad, underscoring cooperation in areas including technology, disaster relief, climate change, and counterterrorism. It reinforced a long-standing tacit understanding that India and the other members agree to disagree about approaches to Russia’s war in Ukraine, emphasizing areas of convergence: concern about humanitarian consequences and calls for peace.
Perhaps of greatest significance is the strong and detailed focus on cooperation on both sides of the Indo-Pacific—the Indian Ocean region to the west and the Pacific Ocean region to the east. The joint statement mentions collaborations on maritime domain awareness, educational exchanges, and cybersecurity in the Indian Ocean region as well as on fisheries, technology, health, disaster response, and security in East Asia.
The Quad long confronted a geographic disconnect: India accorded more strategic significance to the Indian Ocean region, while the other three members had deeper strategic interests in the Pacific Ocean region. Thanks to the China factor, the Quad is now bridging this divide. Beijing’s naval presence is growing in the Indian Ocean region; its only known overseas military base is in Djibouti. This has extended the Pacific powers’ strategic gaze farther west.
Meanwhile, India is strengthening commercial and defense ties with Southeast Asian states, including becoming an arms supplier to the Philippines. Manila is now receiving Indian BrahMos missiles to strengthen its capacity to deter China’s navy in the increasingly volatile South China Sea. This all means that India also has growing equities and deepening strategic interests in the Pacific Ocean region.
This week’s joint statement suggests that despite the absence of high-level Quad meetings this year, lower-level deliberations have ensured that the grouping continues to get things done. Still, questions remain about the status of this year’s leaders’ summit. The statement only indicates that it will happen “later this year.” With Biden now a lame-duck president, Quad members may want to wait until after the U.S. election, perhaps until early 2025.
Behind-the-scenes progress is important, but the symbolic power of the leaders’ summit is crucial as well. It underscores the highest-level commitment to the Quad and all it stands for, sending an important signal to foes China and Russia.
What We’re Following
The dust settles in Bangladesh. This month, Bangladesh’s government survived the country’s largest, longest, and bloodiest anti-government protests in years. Since a July 21 Supreme Court decision dramatically curtailed the number of civil service job quotas awarded to relatives of former Bangladeshi freedom fighters—the initial trigger for the demonstrations—they have abated.
However, a partial curfew remains in effect, and some protest leaders have been arrested. Last Sunday, a group of detained protest leaders appeared on video agreeing to end their movement. Other leaders said they were speaking under duress and vowed to continue to fight for their demands, including the resignations of government and university officials who they believe failed to rein in the violence.
This week, the government has gone into overdrive to push back against criticism of its handling of the crisis, arguing that it supported the peaceful protesters who began the demonstrations, which became violent only when opposition factions infiltrated them. But this messaging has fallen flat at home and abroad. Images have proliferated of security forces violently cracking down, and the arrests of protest leaders belie the notion that Dhaka supported the demonstrations.
Dhaka’s track record doesn’t help its case; for years, it has repeatedly blamed the opposition and cracked down on peaceful protests. This is no small matter for a government that works hard to manage its global image, which has taken a major hit.
Pakistan pleas for debt restructuring. Last Sunday, Pakistani Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb made the unusual disclosure that Pakistan is asking three key funders—China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—to reschedule $12 billion worth of debt for up to five years. That would enable Pakistan to meet a key condition for receiving badly needed financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
This month, Pakistan inked a staff-level agreement with the IMF to provide $7 billion of assistance, but Islamabad must provide assurances of financial support from its donors to the organization to get board-level buy-in and final approval.
Aurangzeb’s comments came shortly after he returned from Beijing. It’s notable that he chose to speak publicly about the delicate negotiations, but he likely wanted to signal to a wide audience Pakistan’s commitment to meeting the IMF’s conditions. Pakistan has received 23 IMF packages in its 76-year history, but more recent negotiations have lagged in part because the country has taken a longer time to secure financing commitments from donors.
South Asia at the Olympics. Unsurprisingly, South Asian countries have not made a dent in the Paris Summer Olympics medal leaderboard in the first few days of competition. Although all eight countries in the region sent athletes to Paris, their number is small. India has 110 athletes, and no other South Asian country has more than seven.
This is mainly because South Asian governments have not given priority to the sports represented at the Summer Games; things could change in 2028, when cricket will return to the Olympics after a 128-year hiatus.
There are some compelling storylines. This week, India won bronze medals in the 10-meter air pistol individual and mixed-team events—the only medals for a South Asian country as of Wednesday. One of the world’s top javelin throwers is Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem, who will face close friend and Indian athlete Neeraj Chopra in the competition next week. At the 2020 Games in Tokyo, Nadeem became the first Pakistani athlete to qualify for an Olympic athletics final.
Under the Radar
Last week, India’s chief economic advisor, V. Anantha Nageswaran, made a striking recommendation: India should consider receiving more foreign direct investment from China. FDI inflows from China have slowed significantly since 2020, when a deadly border crisis sent bilateral relations plummeting and New Delhi subjected Chinese investments to more scrutiny.
Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman gave the recommendation a backhanded endorsement, saying she is not “disowning” it.
Although the move may seem questionable from a geopolitical standpoint, it makes a fair amount of economic sense. As Nageswaran noted, boosting FDI from China could help ease a large Indian trade deficit with the country. It could also help reverse a troubling trend of falling FDI: In India’s fiscal year 2024, which ran from April 2023 through March 2024, net FDI inflow plunged by 62 percent compared with the previous fiscal year.
It would also continue a trend in bilateral commercial ties: India-China economic relations have not been major casualties of worsening geopolitical tensions. Bilateral trade volume—albeit weighted in China’s favor—has remained robust over the last four years, with comparable figures to India-U.S. trade. In fact, China has been India’s top trade partner in recent months.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- The Kamala Harris Doctrine by FP Staff
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- The Trump-Vance Unilateralist Delusion by Stephen M. Walt
Regional Voices
A Daily Star editorial slams Bangladesh’s response to recent protests. “The government’s sole focus seems to be catching those who carried out vandalism of public properties, or clashed with security forces and members of ruling party affiliated groups—totally disregarding the role played by the latter in terms of instigation, escalation, and even the commission of killings,” it argues.
In the Kathmandu Post, professor Lok Raj Baral warns that Nepal must strengthen governance to safeguard its sovereignty. “The sovereignty of the state can be preserved only by relying more on prudent domestic and foreign policy,” he writes. “It is particularly so in Nepal’s context, whose very location does not allow it to be indifferent to the sensitivities of its neighbours, China and India.”
Academic Ashwani Mahajan, writing in the Print, pushes back against claims that India’s new budget doesn’t help the middle class, which it provides with only modest tax benefits. “One must not assess the benefits received by the middle class from the Budget based on tax exemption[s] alone—other provisions must also be taken into account,” he writes.