Modi agrees to join Biden in launch of IPEF in Tokyo after US tweaks text of announcement

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will join President Joe Biden at the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in Tokyo on Monday as the United States tweaked the text of the formal announcement in order to allay some of the misgivings of India.

Modi left New Delhi for Tokyo on Sunday. He will meet several business leaders of Japan on Monday, apart from joining Biden, when the US president will announce the launch of the IPEF – an initiative to counter the economic clout of China in the Indo-Pacific region.

New Delhi confirmed the prime minister’s participation at the launch of the IPEF after days of hectic contact between Indian and American officials. India agreed to be part of the launch of the IPEF after the US changed the text of the formal announcement to reflect that it was still at the stage of consultation and it would remain open for other nations to join later.

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India had conveyed to the US that it could be part of the launch of the IPEF only when the text of the announcement would be tweaked to sync it with its publicly articulated vision of a “free, open and inclusive” Indo-Pacific region.

“It’s just flatly untrue to call (the) IPEF closed. It is by design and definition an open platform. And we do expect, in addition to the countries that join for the launch tomorrow (Monday), others will come along in the months and years ahead,” Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told journalists on Sunday. “That being said, the breadth of participation tomorrow was such that it will very much show that it’s anything but a closed club. It is a — it is a very wide-ranging membership.”

India’s dilemma on joining the IPEF stems from its reluctance to be openly seen joining the US to contain China.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan will also attend the launch of the IPEF. So will the leaders of several other Indo-Pacific nations. It is however not yet clear if Anthony Albanese, the new Prime Minister of Australia, will also attend the event.

Modi, Kishida, Albanese and Biden will hold the second in-person summit of the Quad in Tokyo on Tuesday.

The Quad is a coalition launched by India, Australia, Japan and the US to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region. The IPEF, however, is not an initiative of the Quad.

The IPEF is not a Free Trade Agreement and will not lower tariffs. It is being projected as an instrument for the US to step up its economic engagements with the countries in Asia, particularly the ones in the Indo-Pacific region, where it is keen to counter China.

Sullivan on May 18 described the IPEF as a “21st-century economic arrangement, a new model designed to tackle new economic challenges — from setting the rules of the digital economy, to ensuring secure and resilient supply chains, to managing the energy transition, to investing in clean, modern, high-standards infrastructure”.

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Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, told journalists in New Delhi on May 19 that India had received from the US the details about the IPEF and had been examining it. Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra on Saturday said that the IPEF was still “under discussion” between India and the US and the “discussions and the conversations” were “still going on”.

Kwatra, however, added that the economic segment in the Indo-Pacific region was very important, both in terms of harnessing the opportunities of partnership that were available in the region, whether they were in various dimensions of economic areas, or they were related to capacity building.