JTHE MOGOL PRINCE Dara Shikoh was beheaded in 1659 after publishing a scandalous book, “The Confluence of the Two Seas”, in which he identified a spiritual affinity between Hinduism and Islam. In 2007, Abe Shinzo, then Japanese Prime Minister, borrowed the title of the book for a moving speech before the Indian parliament in which he called for the Indian and Pacific oceans to be considered as a single strategic space, and for Japan and India recognize their common interests. These ideas, bizarre to some at first, are now widely accepted by Western strategists. “Without the Japan-India relationship, there is no Indo-Pacific,” says Kenneth Juster, U.S. Ambassador to India from 2017-2021. “That relationship is critical to why we have this concept and to the future of the region.
Asia’s largest democracy and, in Japan, the wealthiest, were on opposing sides during the Cold War. India was a Soviet sympathizer; Japan an American ally. Yet, over the past decade and a half, they have improved their diplomatic, economic and security relations, with the aim of forging a democratic counterweight to China. Their progress will be remarkable in international diplomacy this year, with Japan chairing the G7 and India G20. Officials from both countries are talking about using their proximity to exploit synergies between the two groups. “Japan looks forward to working hand in hand with India to lead responses to global challenges,” Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa said ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s visit to Delhi. March 20 and 21.
Country leaders attend annual bilateral summits; this will be Mr. Kishida’s second visit to Delhi in two years (see table). Japan is a big investor in accelerating infrastructure development in India. Last year, Mr. Kishida pledged an additional 5 billion yen ($42 billion) in Japanese investment over the next five years. India and Japan are, along with America and Australia, members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or ‘Quad’, a stop-start grouping that was relaunched in 2017. Indian and Japanese armed forces exercise from more and more often together; they conducted their first joint fighter aircraft exercises earlier this year.
This close relationship is based more on shared fears than on common values. The two countries have long-standing territorial disputes with an increasingly aggressive China – India along its northern land border and Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Both are wary of China’s growing influence in their wider region and what it will mean for the maritime lines of communication that each relies on. Each sees the other as essential to meeting the security challenge posed by China.
For Japan, which initiated bilateral detente in the early 2000s, this conclusion was heightened by a first sense of India’s potential. “We thought India would be a future great power,” said Ishii Masafumi, a former Japanese diplomat. “And it’s safe to say that China is the biggest challenge for India, as it is for Japan.”
The partnership has useful foundations. Officials from both countries point to their shared tradition of Buddhism. In 1948, Radhabinod Pal, an Indian judge, became a hero for Japanese nationalists when he cast the only dissenting vote in the Tokyo trials, in which Japan’s imperial leaders were convicted of war crimes. (Abe visited Mr. Pal’s descendants in 2007 after delivering his Two Seas speech.) There are personal ties between the countries’ elites: India’s influential foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, is married to a Japanese woman, Kyoko.
More importantly, decades of Japanese investment and aid, mostly low-cost loans, have given Indians a sunny view of Japan. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, Indians have a positive view of Japan by two to one – a more positive view than they have of any other major country other than America. And where America may be polarized in Indian politics, Japan is not, says Christopher Johnstone of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: “Japan is seen differently and has an advantage that we, the America, have not.
If Mr Kishida ventured into Delhi during his visit, he would see streets brimming with Japanese influence. Indian officials favor large Toyota pickups and SUVs. By far the most common cars on the capital’s roads are the boxy and often dented Maruti Suzukis, which weave through traffic at optimistic speeds. Indeed, Suzuki, a Japanese firm that entered the Indian market in the 1980s through a joint venture with the government, still accounts for more than 40% of cars sold in India.
The Japanese footprint extends underground: the Delhi Metro was built with Japanese assistance. Japanese companies are also involved in planning a high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, a project dear to the Indian Prime Minister. And they’ve helped build infrastructure in India’s long-neglected northeast, in part to counter China’s growing involvement in the region, says Horimoto Takenori, a Japanese India scholar.
Yet, for all the countries’ intersecting interests, in some ways their relationship is struggling to fulfill its potential. Trade and investment between India and Japan is far below what was once envisioned, despite the apparent complementarity of young, developing and labor-rich India with aging Japan, technologically advanced and capital rich. In a book written in 2006, Abe thought Japan’s trade with India could overtake that with America and China within a decade.
Yet in 2022, China accounted for 24% of Japan’s imports and 22% of its exports; India accounted for only 0.8% of Japan’s imports and 1.7% of its exports. In 2014, during Abe’s second term, he and Mr Modi pledged to double the number of Japanese companies in India within five years. But by 2019, the number had dropped from 1,156 to just 1,454. (More than 13,000 Japanese companies had a presence in China that year.)
Abe also failed to persuade India to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a major Asian trade pact in which China participates. ports, airports and energy, says Dhruva Jaishankar of the Observer Research Foundation America, the US arm of a Delhi-based think tank. (Mr. Jaishankar is the son of India’s foreign minister.)
Much less than Abe wanted
In defense and security, too, the ties are less important than it seems. Japan and India have signed several defense equipment transfer agreements over the past decade. But there has been little real cooperation between their defense sectors. A Japanese bid to generate interest in a new amphibious aircraft failed because India deemed it too expensive. An Indian initiative to acquire Japanese submarines failed due to Japan’s reluctance to transfer technology. Although the two armies practice more together, their rudimentary exercises are more learning exercises than serious preparation for either country to come to the military aid of the other.
This partly reflects divergent military priorities. While India and Japan are also worried about China, “the nature of the worry is different,” says Kurita Masahiro of the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo. China mainly presents maritime challenges for Japan. India, which shares 3,440 km (2,100 miles) of border with China, much of which is disputed, is more focused on a possible ground war.
The bilateral underperformance is particularly frustrating for Japan. He is “a bit worn down by India’s slow pace of strategic change”, says Michael Green of the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. “India replaced in Japanese dance card by Australia”. Last year, Japan and Australia signed a pact to facilitate closer defense cooperation. America too has placed less emphasis on the Quad and more on AUKUS, an ambitious new alliance between America, Australia and Britain to establish a fleet of nuclear submarines capable of countering China in the Pacific.
Even optimists in Tokyo believe India’s commitment is a long-term investment with uncertain returns. “We know they will be a very difficult superpower, like a great France,” quips Kanehara Nobukatsu, Abe’s former deputy national security adviser. India’s position on the war in Ukraine is an illustration of this. Japan stands with America and other Western allies against Russia’s aggression. India, which has close ties with Russia, the source of much of its energy and most of its arms imports, remained neutral. In September 2022, it took part, alongside China, in the Russian naval exercise Vostok, which skirted a group of Russian-controlled islands northeast of Hokkaido that Japan claims as its own.
India, for its part, has long been frustrated with Japan’s restrictive immigration policy. “The lack of people-to-people exchanges is a huge gap,” says Delhi security analyst Ajai Shukla. In 2021, the two countries agreed to allow Indian job seekers to work in Japan. Yet visas are mostly restricted to a small number of professions: currently nursing and agriculture. The resulting lack of a large Indian diaspora in Japan makes it more difficult to form India’s deep ties with America, Britain and some Gulf countries, to which Indians have been migrating for decades. .
The relationship also lost an important personal element when its main architect, Abe, was murdered last summer. “Modi doesn’t have many friends abroad, but Abe was an exception,” laments Dr Horimoto. In Delhi this week, Mr. Kishida will try to push further the bilateral path traced by his predecessor. For now, says Dr Horimoto, the two leaders will focus on laying the groundwork for the “main occasions” that the G7 And G20 will present later this year. India wants to take advantage of its presidency of G20 to advance the economic interests of poorer countries and is looking to Japan for help. Japan, in turn, is keen to take advantage of its turn to lead the G7 to stimulate awareness in the developing world, and sees India as a key conduit. “Without India, we cannot engage the countries of the South,” says Mr. Kanehara.
This speaks to the progression of the relationship, despite its shortcomings. For Western strategists, Asian democracies are increasingly united across two great seas. India and Japan sit at their southwestern and northeastern extremes – and fear of Chinese assertion lies at the confluence.■
