Reading the Lowy Institute's Address From Apia

At the Lowy Institute, the Observer Research Foundation president launched the new India program with Shruti Pandalai as inaugural India Chair. Saran's argument was tight. American withdrawal has opened ground for the middle powers to build the next regional order and not wait for a US-China G2 to write the rules in their absence. That opening, in Saran's reading, falls to a five-power coalition still in early formation.

He proposed a troika of Australia, India and Indonesia, scaled up to a Quad with Japan, then a Quint with Canada. He also sketched an Indian Ocean axis from Perth through New Delhi to Abu Dhabi. The defense manufacturing compact came next, with India bringing scale and Australia bringing strategic-mineral reserves and engineering teams. India, paired with Australia, should become the arsenal of the liberal order, Saran argued from the Lowy stage.

What Saran did not address, and what the Sydney audience did not press him on, was the geographic center of that geometry. The line from Perth to the Arabian Sea cuts across the southern approaches to Melanesia. The troika of Canberra, New Delhi and Jakarta surrounds the same arc. Any Quint widened to Canada stretches the arc further. And so the Pacific Islands becomes central to the Quint's strategy, with our own language stack that enters every bilateral document the four-or-five powers might choose to sign.

Alongside the geometry Saran sketched, India already maintains its own Pacific Islands program. Modi launched the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation in Suva in November 2014 and convened the third summit in Port Moresby in May 2023. Australia has been pursuing its Pacific Step-Up since 2018, with a Pacific Engagement Visa drawing Pacific nationals to Brisbane, Perth and Auckland. The two programs have rarely been mapped onto each other. Both rely on documents that travel in Fijian, Tongan, Samoan, Solomon Islands Pijin and Tok Pisin before any Pacific cabinet sees them.

On supply-chain minerals, Saran cited the figure that China refines 19 of the 20 tracked in strategic lists. Australia holds at least 31 of the same minerals in the ground. The thread between the rock and the refinery has Perth as its hinge, where mining companies fly in crews drawn from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The induction packs, safety briefings, grievance procedures and superannuation forms that follow those crews home are the ground floor of any Australia-India minerals compact, and none of them survive in English alone.

Turning to defense manufacturing, the compact Saran proposed has Pacific implications he did not address. A signed compact would route material, personnel and procurement language across the same Melanesian air bridges that already shuttle FIFO mining crews to and from Perth. The Pacific Policing Initiative based at the Pinkenba Hub in Brisbane is a small, early example of how multilateral security touches Tok Pisin, Solomon Islands Pijin and Bislama as a matter of daily delivery. And we know a larger Australia-India compact would multiply that load by several factors.

India has placed a substantial bet on nuclear energy, and Saran named Australia as the first partner India should approach on uranium and engineering. The civilian nuclear story has a Pacific footnote. Marshallese diaspora communities in Hawaiʻi, Oregon and Arkansas still litigate the legacy of US Pacific Proving Grounds testing, with court papers translated between English and Marshallese on a routine basis. A serious Australia-India nuclear conversation should know that Marshallese-language access is the test the Pacific applies to any new nuclear actor in the region, before any compact is signed.

On trade, the bilateral figure between Australia and India has nearly doubled to USD 25 billion. Saran put the next target at USD 200 billion over five to seven years. 8x growth in seven years! That trajectory multiplies legal, customs and labor documentation by an order of magnitude, like Elon says. The bulk of new trade will flow through Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth as Australian endpoints, with diaspora populations from across the Pacific employed in logistics, security, catering and customs roles at every node.

India will add 400 million people to its middle class in the coming decade. That cohort travels. Air New Zealand, Fiji Airways, Air Tahiti Nui and Qantas have all begun routing Indian leisure traffic into Pacific destinations through Sydney, Auckland and Nadi hubs. The Pacific tourism boards in Suva, Papeʻete, Nukuʻalofa and Apia have begun translating their inbound material into Hindi alongside Mandarin. The India-Pacific tourism segment is now an active trade route, and its daily layer is multilingual by design.

Alongside the tourism corridor, Australian universities have become the second-largest study-abroad destination for Indian graduate students, with cohorts clustering in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. Some of those graduates take placements in Pacific-facing roles, including DFAT-adjacent consultancies and the Suva-based regional bodies funded out of Canberra. Pacific Studies departments in Auckland, Wellington and Suva have begun adding Hindi reading lists for incoming PhD cohorts. The India-Pacific scholarly traffic is small in headcount, large in the documents it produces, and it generates steady need for translation between Hindi, English and the major Pacific languages.

The Lowy panel touched on citizen science and youth diplomacy as long-term building blocks of the relationship where both need translated material to reach past English-speaking elites. Citizen-science platforms in coastal monitoring and fisheries observation are now in trial use in Fijian, Solomon Islands Pijin and Tok Pisin across the western Pacific. A serious India-Australia uplift here would route Indian regional-language platforms in Tamil, Telugu and Bengali into the same data systems, with Pacific languages as the bridge layer.

In parallel, the Quad's joint agenda has turned toward strategic and emerging technology, with AI, quantum and undersea cables on the plan. Each of those tracks has a Pacific endpoint. Submarine cable stations in Suva, Papeʻete and Port Moresby now route traffic for India, Australia and the United States in parallel. The protocols, maintenance contracts and data-residency policies that govern those stations are signed in three or four languages already, with Tok Pisin and Fijian as recurring layers when local cabinet sign-off is needed. Quintilateral tech cooperation would multiply the language load further.

Saran's closing point was that AI, outer space and the deep oceans have no settled governance yet. India and Australia can be rule shapers or rule takers. Read the choice from a Pacific desk and the missing piece becomes obvious. Pacific Island states already chair multilateral bodies on deep-sea mining and on Pacific Ocean Commissioner duties. Any India-Australia rule-shaping contribution that fails to arrive in Tongan, Tuvaluan, Nauruan, Kiribati and Marshallese will not bind the islands whose waters are at stake.

Penny Wong and S. Jaishankar have now met across the table 28 times. That regularity has produced countless summit communiqués, joint groups and statements at a pace neither foreign ministry was used to, yet, the next phase, the one Saran proposed from the Lowy stage, asks both governments to push the same energy into the daily layer of the relationship. And so the Pacific Islands are the test bed. If a USD 200 billion target and a five-power security geometry are going to hold, the documents that bear them must read in iTaukei, Tetum, Solomon Islands Pijin, Bislama, Tok Pisin and Marshallese before they read anywhere else.