External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar on Saturday confirmed that the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) Leaders' Summit was "not cancelled", but it had also not been formally scheduled so far.
Jaishankar had been responding to a question that arose in a conversation with Germany's Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul—on the topic 'Navigating Uncertainty: India and Germany in a World in Disarray’—in the 2026 edition of the Munich Security Conference: whether the summit of the security bloc comprising India, the United States, Japan and Australia, had lost its momentum after it had not been held last year.
"The fact that the QUAD did not take place at the summit level itself, I wouldn't overread it. So do stay tuned," he said at the Munich conference.
After admitting that the QUAD meeting last year did not take place, he declared that the bloc's operations were still taking place beyond high-level political meetings—in the form of various working groups and institutional mechanisms, an ANI report said.
In fact, he even pointed out that two meetings in the QUAD Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (FMM) format had taken place since Marco Rubio became Washington's Secretary of State in January 2025.
He also made sure to reiterate India's stance on procuring oil in line with national priorities as the US continues to push New Delhi to buy Venezuelan crude and move away from Russian oil.
Jaishankar's remarks are said to be India's first public comments on the QUAD since US President Donald Trump announced an India-US trade deal earlier this month.
Loosely structured as an anti-China influence, the QUAD was one of US President Donald Trump's flagship policies during his first term in office.
However, it was the shifting geopolitical and trade ties brought on by Trump's second term that had put the relevance of the bloc in serious doubt, especially with China using the absence of the QUAD Summit in 2025 to project its stabilising influence in the Global South at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit.
India, however, had been very careful in its discourse about the QUAD last year, with PM Narendra Modi talking about how the QUAD was important to the Indo-Pacific and its various sub-regions.
However, India is also supposed to be hosting the QUAD Leaders' Summit this year, which is expected to build economic and security ties on the heels of the progress made in the interim trade deal.
On February 13, US Senators Tim Kaine and Pete Ricketts, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Rubio encouraging the Trump administration to schedule the next QUAD Dialogue.
"All four QUAD partners face shared challenges including supply chain vulnerabilities, restrictions on critical minerals, threats to a free and open Indo-Pacific, and intensifying competition over emerging technologies," read their letter, highlighting common concerns.