India-Japan relations in good health:

India-Japan relations in good health:

Context

• Visit of Japanese PM Shinzo Abe to India and the bonhomie between the two leaders.
• Reaffirmation of special ties.

Factors that lead to the bonhomie

• The rise of China.
• The joint statement calls for “a free, open and prosperous Indo-Pacific region where sovereignty and international law are respected, and differences are resolved through dialogue, and where all countries, large or small, enjoy freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development, and a free, fair, and open trade and investment system.” It is understood that China, which is following an aggressive policy in the region, is targeted in the statement
• The joint statement also endorses the principles on which India decided to sit out the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
• The statement also does well to hint at the role of China in creating the international problems that North Korea and Pakistan today are.
• Also, Japan has been unsure of the US commitment to its allies ever since Donald Trump started his presidential campaign.
• The ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) capability of North Korea has aggravated Tokyo’s worries about the decoupling of the US-Japan alliance.
• It is not clear whether the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) will be able to hold its own in the face of increasing Chinese assertiveness in the region.
• Indo-Russian relations, a stabilizing factor in the past, are in flux.
• In this scenario, India and Japan are the only major forces of stability in the Indo-Pacific.

How the two countries complement each other?

• Japan’s Ageing population and India demographic dividend.
• Japan’s advanced technology and India’s rich natural and human resources.
• Japan’s excellence in manufacturing and India’s progress in the service sector.
• Japan’s surplus capital which could be a source of FDI in India and India’ hunger for investments, growing markets and purchasing power of the middle class.

Special relationship with Japan

• India is known to grant titles of “strategic partnership” very generously.
• The relationship with Japan, however, is too special to be given the same treatment.
• Therefore, the Indo-Japanese bilateral cooperation is carried out under the framework of a “special strategic and global partnership”.

Unprecedented momentum in the past 3 years

• The commencement of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail project (bullet train).

In the last three years,

• Japan has been made a permanent participant in the Malabar naval exercises which also involves the US.
• The two countries have inked a nuclear deal—Japan’s first with a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
• The India-Japan-US trilateral has been upgraded to ministerial level.
• A new trilateral at the foreign secretary level has been initiated with Australia as the third country.
• In addition to these, the numbers on Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) and overseas development assistance (ODA) to India have been climbing.
• Last year has seen the highest ever disbursement of official development assistance from Japan in a financial year.
• Other than the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail, many other high-profile projects like the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and Mumbai Trans-harbour link project are under different stages of execution.

Areas of disappointment

There are disappointments too;

• The trade numbers—below $15 billion annually in the last two years—do not reflect the economic ties between the third and the fourth largest (on purchasing power parity terms) economies in the world.
• Long pending defence deals—especially the sale of US-2 amphibious aircraft to India—too haven’t moved forward.
• However, these areas of slow growth cannot take away from the tremendous distance that has been covered elsewhere.

Future

• The two countries are exploring cooperation on infrastructure and human development projects beyond India.
• The Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC), if pursued with an unwavering focus, has the potential to become a serious counterweight to China’s BRI.
• Unlike BRI, the AAGC promises to evolve a consultative mechanism towards identification and implementation of projects.