India, Japan Ties: Towards A New Architecture

The India-Japan partnership is one of the important thrust areas of Japan’s new foreign policy. In the recent past, except for Mori, Koizumi, and Abe, other prime ministers have shown little enthusiasm for improving their relationship with India. However, that trend seems to be changing.

First, the Indian political elite has increasingly looked to Japan as Japan steered towards India’s new proactive role as a hard power, soft power and cultural superpower in Asia and the world. Japanese leaders, born after the Second World War and without baggage, represented a new generation of leaders in Tokyo who believed that Japan should shed its defensive posture about its imperial past and become a “normal” power. Abe, Fukuda and Aso have pressed ahead with Koizumi’s agenda of unshackling Japan from its post-Second World War political limitations and constitutional inhibitions on re-defining Self-Defense Forces and taking new, visible security responsibilities in Asia and beyond. Unlike the rest of Asia, particularly East Asia and South East Asia, which might be apprehensive about the profound and perceptible political change given Japan’s past and ‘painful’ history, India, which has no historical issue with Japan, is more welcoming and accommodating and can be considered its natural ally to be welcome aboard.

Second, the rise of China in recent years has compelled Japan to re-evaluate its long-term options in Asia, which some experts expect would devote all its energy to maximizing and promoting Chinese national interests in a realistic sense. As Japan, much like the United States, hedges its bets against the unbridled rise of China, political and security cooperation with India has become an essential cornerstone of Japan’s new grand strategic calculus. However, Japan’s new emphasis on a “global and strategic partnership” with India does not mean the two want to ally against China. In an age of globalization and rapid economic integration in Asia, China is already Japan's largest trading partner and is set to acquire a similar status to India. The trade volume between Japan and China or China and India is noticeably greater than between India and Japan. Similarly, regarding people-people contact, while an average of 5.6 million people travel between China and Japan a year, only 160,000 travel between India and Japan. The focus of both New Delhi and Tokyo is on widening the window of flexibility in their conduct of economic, foreign and security policies in Asia rather than seeking containment of China’s power leverage that would provide no real benefits to any party either in the short term or intermediate term or long term.

Third, while China will remain the key partner for Japan, Tokyo, under Taro Aso, is inclined to invest and enter into important economic relationships for a possible multi-polar Asia. Consequently, India has overtaken China as the largest recipient of Japan’s Overseas Development Assistance (ODA). As Japan has fallen behind China and Korea in taking advantage of India’s economic reforms, Prime Minister Taro Aso, during his October 2008 meeting with India’s Prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, highlighted the need to engage India and its emerging economy. The result is substantial progress made in the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) and Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which will fully utilize the potential and natural complementarities between the two countries on a sustained, long-term basis. The EPA, conceptually larger than a free trade agreement, is likely to engage the two countries to look beyond Tokyo's traditional emphasis on ODA and soft loan aid.

Finally, Aso, like Abe, has injected the notion of shared political values into the bilateral discourse for the first time in the last sixty years. Despite being two major working democracies worldwide, the shared vision of democracy has never figured in the India-Japan relationship. With a firm commitment to openness and constructive engagement, the Indo-US nuclear deal, for example, promises to bring Japan a helping hand to India in harnessing nuclear energy in its civilian sector.

As Asia, the largest continent, undergoes a major transformation in terms of economic recession and power configurations, India and Japan are acutely aware of the need for political and security cooperation between the two countries to ensure order, harmony, stability and equilibrium among the region’s great powers, including China. Both countries recognize that India-Japan cooperation and engagement cannot be sustained on sheer expediency. Still, they have to be firmly rooted in shared common values and interests in both economic and strategic terms beyond the ODA and Malabar exercise. That precisely is why Dr Manmohan Singh and Taro Aso committed to tapping potential areas for ushering in the region's new architecture of peace and cooperation. Given immense economic opportunities and geo-strategic compulsions between India and Japan in various areas, one hopes that under Japan’s current Prime Minister Taro Aso’s stewardship, the same momentum would be carried forward in 2009 and beyond toward a new paradigm of mutual benefit.