South Korea needs to be included into QUAD

From the report

Addressing a forum the other day, India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh did well to pitch for an Indo-Pacific. This is an excellent idea indeed. We all know the Indo-Pacific region hosts the straits of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb and Malacca, crucial for the growth of almost all major economic powers in the region. This makes an effective co-ordination among the states, including India, in the region to protect the straits a must.

One, however, is not sure how serious New Delhi has been about the idea of Indo-Pacific. So far, it has done little to equip the region with an appropriate security architecture to defend its interests. South Korea, an important power in the region, is not yet part of even the vague Quadrilateral Security Dialogue forum India, along with the United States, Japan and Australia, has created to protect the region.

One hopes New Delhi would take concrete steps to address this fallacy in future. It could initiate efforts to include South Korea into the QUAD without much difficulty. Historically, India and South Korea have had a lot in common. India and South Korea have had warm ties with each other since ancient times. After the two nations emerged as new modern states in the post-World War landscape, New Delhi has always been sympathetic to Seoul. It sided with Seoul when the latter championed the right to self-determination for the entire Korean peninsula. In the post-cold war landscape, the two nations have upgraded the India-South Korea Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement to include the protocols focused on their mutual trade facilitation, investment protection, and technology- defense cooperation.