US had asked Manmohan Singh to discourage Japan on Quad alliance: Former diplomat Shyam Saran

According to former foreign secretary Shyam Saran, the US urged Manmohan Singh, the prime minister at the time, to ask his Japanese counterpart to “not encourage” the diplomatic alliance that was centered on the Indo-Pacific area. The US was the one who convinced India to establish the Quad alliance.

Speaking on Saturday at the 17th Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), Saran said that the US had justified its stance on the Quad by stating that “neither the Chinese nor the Russians were very happy with the Quad” and that it was necessary to have China on its side in the dispute over Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs.

Following China’s objections, the Quad, a diplomatic alliance comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, was placed on hold. Following a ten-year hiatus, it was brought back in 2017 in response to China’s increasing aggressiveness in international affairs.

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“What happened was before our PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo for an official visit, I was contacted by our American friends and we were told, ‘Please tell your PM not to encourage Abe (the then Japanese PM) on the Quad. He would like to push this forward. This is not the time we should be doing this’,” Saran said during his address.

Later on, attempts were made to incorporate it into the Quad alliance, which was headed by the late Shinzo Abe in his first year as Japan’s prime minister, from 2006 to 2007.

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Without a doubt, China is the “cement” that keeps the Quad alliance together, according to Saran. Beijing, which once referred to the Quad as “some fluff on the ocean wave,” will no longer use that term because the group has gained “substance.”

“Maybe it is not against China, but it has certainly been made more crystallised as a result of a common sense amongst all our partners that the balance of power in the - what we call the Indo-Pacific - has been changing against us. And therefore if we do not work together this balance is going to get worse,” he said.

Among the panelists debating the subject was US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti, who stated that “the present and the history we are writing” are more significant to him than historical events, but he did not explicitly address Saran’s comments.