Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate in the third in-person Quad meeting with US President Joe Biden, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese and Japan’s Fumio Kishida on Saturday in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which is also hosting the G7 summit. On Wednesday, Hindustan Times had reported about the Quad summit taking place in Hiroshima after Biden had postponed his visit to Australia.
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The White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement said after President Biden had to postpone his visit to Australia, the Quad leaders agreed they would hold their summit in Hiroshima to ensure that the four leaders could come together to mark the Quad’s progress over the past year.
“Along with sharing strategic assessments, the leaders will welcome new forms of Quad cooperation on secure digital technology, submarine cables, infrastructure capacity building, and maritime domain awareness. President Biden thanks Prime Minister Albanese, as well as the Prime Ministers of Japan and India, for their flexibility, and he looks forward to rescheduling his trip”, the White House statement added. According to top officials, the Quad preparations are complete and all the four partners will enhance the security of the group by ‘close economic and technological cooperation aimed at building global supply chains and capacity building across the board’.
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The officials have said that Quad is not a gang up of democratic powers against Beijing, but it is about mutual economic, technological and security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. However, the belligerence of China in the Indo-Pacific is one of the foundation pillars of the Quad.
Biden is also expected to meet PM Modi on the sidelines of the G7 summit. Both India and US along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will announce a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on regional integration of the Middle East with road and rail infrastructure as an alternative to China’s Belt Road Initiative (BRI).
