QUAD requires more robust architecture than the summit driven mode to tide over the current challenges. Elaborate.

Where the Quad stands. Formed as tsunami relief coordination in 2004, revived as a dialogue in 2007, lapsed after Australia's withdrawal, restored at official level in 2017 and raised to leaders' summit in 2021. It has produced working groups on vaccines, critical and emerging technology, climate, infrastructure, space and maritime domain awareness, and the Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness initiative. Malabar naval exercises run alongside it but are formally separate.

Why summit-driven mode is fragile.

• Electoral hostage. Four democracies means four election cycles; a summit missed or downgraded is read across the region as a signal of decline, and the grouping's credibility rides on the personal commitment of whoever holds office.
• No secretariat, no budget, no treaty. Announcements are not obligations, so implementation depends on each capital's bureaucracy finding its own resources.
• Deliverables outrun delivery. The vaccine partnership announced ambitious production targets that were not met, which is precisely the reputational cost an informal body cannot absorb.
• Strategic ambiguity cuts both ways. Refusing to define the Quad as a security arrangement lowers the entry cost for India but leaves partners unsure what it would actually do in a crisis.

The architecture required.

• A permanent secretariat with a modest budget and a rotating chair, so continuity does not depend on leaders.
• Institutionalised officials' machinery below the leaders — regular senior officials' meetings with published work plans and a public scorecard against previous commitments.
• Functional agreements with legal force in the areas where the Quad is genuinely distinctive: semiconductor and critical mineral supply chains, undersea cables, maritime domain awareness data-sharing, and disaster response with pre-positioned assets.
• A defined relationship with ASEAN, so that ASEAN centrality is honoured in practice rather than in communiqués.

The constraint. India will resist anything resembling an alliance, since strategic autonomy and the continental border with China set its limits. The realistic path is therefore deep functional institutionalisation without a mutual defence clause — a working organisation rather than an alliance.