India announced on Monday that Australia will join the next Malabar exercise, meaning that the four member nations of the ‘Yard‘or the quadrilateral coalition will participate in the mega drill.
The United States and Japan are the other countries participating in the annual exercise, which will likely take place next month in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
Commenting on the announcement, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a press conference here that China has “taken note of this fact.”
“We always believe that military cooperation between countries should lead to regional peace and stability,” he said in a short reaction.
India’s decision to heed Australia’s request to be part of the naval mega drill comes amid growing tension in ties with China over the border row in eastern Ladakh.
China has become suspicious of the purpose of the Malabar exercise, as it believes that the play of war it is an effort to contain its influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Exercise Malabar began in 1992 as a bilateral drill between the Indian Navy and the United States Navy in the Indian Ocean. Japan became a permanent participant in the exercise in 2015. This annual exercise was conducted off the coast of Guam in the Philippine Sea in 2018 and off the coast of Japan in 2019.
Over the past few years, Australia has shown great interest in joining the exercise.
The evolving situation in the Indo-Pacific in the wake of China’s growing flexing of military muscle has become an important topic of conversation among major world powers. The United States has been in favor of making Quad a security architecture to control China’s growing assertiveness in the strategic Indo-Pacific region.
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