NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 147 of 150

Correct — D, Australia. The twenty-first edition of Exercise Malabar was held in 2017 in the Bay of Bengal, and the participants were India, the United States and Japan — the three navies that were then the standing partners in the exercise. It was a large deployment by Malabar's standards, with sixteen ships, two submarines and ninety-five aircraft taking part. Australia was not among them. Australia joined Malabar only in 2020, more than two years after this paper was set, and from that year the exercise became a four-navy affair matching the membership of the Quad grouping.

• (a)United States of America — The United States has been in Malabar from the beginning; the exercise started as a bilateral India-United States naval exercise and the American navy has been in every edition. It certainly took part in 2017.
• (b)Japan — Japan took part in the 2017 edition. It had appeared in Malabar intermittently from the middle of the 2000s and became a standing participant in the middle of the last decade, so by 2017 it was one of the three permanent partners.
• (c)India — India is the host and the constant of the exercise — the name Malabar itself comes from the Indian coast where the first editions were held. An option asking whether India took part in an Indian exercise is there to be discarded at once.

Malabar began in 1992 as a bilateral naval exercise between India and the United States and grew into the most important multilateral exercise in India's naval calendar. Japan came in as a regular partner in the middle of the last decade, and Australia in 2020. The exercise alternates between the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific and covers surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, air defence and maritime interdiction. India runs a long list of named bilateral exercises alongside it — Naseem-Al-Bahr with Oman, Varuna with France, Indra with Russia, Simbex with Singapore — and examiners test the pairing of the name with the partner.

Anchor this to the exam and then say plainly what has changed, because the answer to this very question would be different today. In 2017 Australia's participation was a live diplomatic question: it had asked to take part and India held back, weighing the signal such a four-navy exercise would send to China. That calculation shifted after the border tensions of 2020, and India invited Australia in for the Malabar of that year. Since then all four Quad navies have exercised together, so a candidate answering an item about a recent edition of Malabar must not carry the 2017 answer forward. The useful habit is to hold Malabar as a sequence — bilateral from 1992, trilateral with Japan, quadrilateral from 2020 — rather than as a fixed list.

• The 21st edition of Malabar was held in 2017 in the Bay of Bengal with India, the United States and Japan.
• It involved sixteen ships, two submarines and ninety-five aircraft.
• Malabar began in 1992 as a bilateral India-United States naval exercise.
• Japan became a standing participant in the middle of the last decade; Australia joined in 2020.
• From 2020 Malabar has been a four-navy exercise, matching the membership of the Quad.

• Carrying the 2017 participant list into a question about a recent edition; Australia has been in since 2020.
• Confusing Malabar with the tri-service or army exercises that also carry place names.
• Overlooking that the stem says NOT and marking a country that did take part.

NDA sets one or two military-exercise items per paper, either naming the exercise and asking for the partner or naming the partner and asking for the exercise.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  From which year has Australia taken part in Exercise Malabar alongside India, the United States and Japan?

  • (a)2015
  • (b)2017
  • (c)2018
  • (d)2020

  Answer(d) 2020 — from that year Malabar became a four-navy exercise matching the Quad.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Exercise Malabar began in 1992 as a bilateral naval exercise between India and

  • (a)Japan
  • (b)the United States
  • (c)the United Kingdom
  • (d)Australia

  Answer(b) the United States — Japan and later Australia were added over the following decades.