THE MUGHAL 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 Japan’s
prime minister, borrowed the book’s title for a stirring speech to
India’s parliament in which he called for the Indian and Pacific oceans
to be seen as one strategic space,
and for Japan and India to recognise their shared interests. Those
ideas, the basis for taking an expansive Indo-Pacific view of Asian
security, are now widely accepted among Western strategists. “Without
the Japan-India relationship, there is no Indo-Pacific,” says Kenneth
Juster, America’s ambassador to India from 2017 to 2021. “That
relationship is vital to why we have this concept, and to the future of
the region.”
Listen to this story.
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.Kishida
Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, endorsed that on March 20th during a
two-day visit to Delhi. “India is the place where the Free and Open
Indo-Pacific came into being,” he declared. Asia’s biggest democracy and
its richest one were on opposite sides in the cold war. But over the
past decade and a half they have dramatically improved their diplomatic,
economic and security ties. Their aim is to forge a democratic
counterweight to China. And their progress, as Mr Kishida and Narendra
Modi also stressed in Delhi, will be conspicuous in international
diplomacy this year, with Japan chairing the G7 and India the G20. The Japanese and Indian leaders spoke of trying to improve co-ordination between the two groupings.
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The
countries’ leaders attend annual bilateral summits; this was Mr
Kishida’s second visit to Delhi in two years (see chart). Japan is a big
investor in India’s accelerating infrastructure development.
Last year Mr Kishida promised an additional 5trn yen ($42bn) in
Japanese investment over the next five years. India and Japan are, with
America and Australia, members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad”,
a once stop-start grouping that was revived in 2017. The Indian and
Japanese armed forces exercise together increasingly often; they
conducted their first joint fighter-jet drills earlier this year.
This
closening relationship is based more on shared fears than common
values. Both countries have longstanding 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 growing Chinese influence in their wider region,
and what it will mean for the maritime lines of communication each
relies on. Each sees the other as central to confronting the security
challenge that China poses.
For Japan,
which initiated the bilateral detente in the early 2000s, that
conclusion was sharpened by an early sense of India’s potential. “We
believed that India would be a future big power,” says Ishii Masafumi, a
former Japanese diplomat. “And it’s safe to say that China is the
largest challenge for India, like it is for Japan.”
The
partnership has some useful underpinnings. Officials in 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
lone dissenting vote at the Tokyo trials, in which Japanese imperial
leaders were convicted of war crimes. (Abe visited Mr Pal’s descendants
in 2007 after making his Two Seas speech.) There are some personal ties
between the countries’ elites: India’s influential foreign minister,
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, is married to a Japanese woman, Kyoko.
More
important, 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 Centre, Indians regard Japan positively by two to one—a
brighter view than they have of any big country other than America. And
where America can be polarising in Indian politics, Japan is not, says
Christopher Johnstone of the Centre for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington: “Japan is viewed differently and has an advantage
that we, America, don’t have.”
As Mr
Kishida was driven around Delhi this week, he will have seen streets
teeming with Japanese influence. Indian officials tend to favour large
Toyota vans and SUVs. By far the commonest cars on the
capital’s roads are nifty Maruti Suzukis, weaving through traffic at
optimistic speeds. Suzuki, a Japanese firm that entered the Indian
market in the 1980s through a joint venture with the country’s
government, still accounts for over 40% of cars sold in India.
The
Japanese imprint extends underground: Delhi’s metro was built with
Japanese help. Japanese firms are also helping plan a high-speed rail
link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in Mr Modi’s home state of Gujarat, a
project close to the heart of the Indian prime minister. And they have
helped build infrastructure in India’s long-neglected north-east—in part
to counter growing Chinese involvement in the region, says Horimoto
Takenori, a Japanese scholar of India.
Yet
for all the countries’ overlapping interests, in some ways their
relationship is struggling to fulfil its potential. India-Japan trade
and investment fall far short of what was once envisaged—despite the
seeming complementarity of young, developing, labour-rich India with
ageing, technologically advanced, capital-rich Japan. In 2006 Abe mused
that Japan’s trade with India might surpass that with America and China
within a decade.
But in 2022 China
accounted for 24% of Japan’s imports and 22% of its exports; India
represented just 0.8% of Japan’s imports and 1.7% of its exports. In
2014, during Abe’s second term, he and Mr Modi vowed to double the
number of Japanese companies in India within five years. But by 2019 the
number had grown from 1,156 to only 1,454. (Over 13,000 Japanese
companies were present in China that year.)
Abe
also failed to persuade India to join the Regional Comprehensive
Economic Partnership, a big Asian trade pact that China takes part in.
Even now, as investors look to diversify from China, it is striking how
rarely Japanese ones are involved in key Indian sectors such as ports,
airports and energy, reckons Dhruva Jaishankar of the Observer Research
Foundation America, the American offshoot of a Delhi-based think-tank.
(Mr Jaishankar is the son of India’s foreign minister.)
Much less than Abe wanted
On
defence and security, too, ties amount to less than meets the eye.
Japan and India have signed several defence-equipment transfer
agreements in the past decade. But there has been little actual
co-operation between their defence sectors. A Japanese bid to attract
interest in a new amphibious aircraft fizzled because India thought it
too expensive. An initiative by India to acquire Japanese submarines
failed because Japan hesitated to transfer the technology. Though the
two armies are exercising more together, their rudimentary drills are
more getting-to-know-you exercises than a serious preparation for either
country to come to the other’s military aid.
In
part this reflects divergent military priorities. While India and Japan
are equally worried about China, “the nature of the concern is
different”, says Kurita Masahiro of the National Institute for Defence
Studies in Tokyo. China presents mostly maritime challenges for Japan.
India, which shares 3,440km (2,100 miles) of border with China, much of
it disputed, is more focused on possible land warfare.
The
bilateral underperformance is especially frustrating to Japan. It is
“getting a little worn down by the slow pace of Indian strategic
change”, says Michael Green of the United States Studies Centre at the
University of Sydney. “India has been replaced in the Japanese dance
card by Australia.” Last year Japan and Australia signed a pact to
improve defence co-operation. America, too, has been putting less stress
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
reckon that engaging India is a long-term investment with uncertain
returns. “We know they will be a very difficult superpower—like a big
France,” says Kanehara Nobukatsu, a former deputy national-security
adviser to Abe. India’s stance on the war in Ukraine illustrates this.
Japan stands with America and other Western allies against Russia’s
aggression, a stance Mr Kishida reiterated this week. From Delhi, he
travelled to Kyiv to meet Ukraine’s president. India, which maintains
close ties to Russia, the source of much of its energy and most of its
arms imports, has stayed neutral. In September 2022 it took part,
alongside China, in Russia’s Vostok naval exercise, which skirted a
group of Russian-controlled islands, north-east 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 massive gap,” says Ajai
Shukla, a security analyst in Delhi. In 2021 the two countries agreed to
co-operate on a new Japanese foreign-worker programme. Yet visas are
restricted to 14 professions and mostly limit stays to five years
without family. The resulting lack of a sizeable Indian diaspora in
Japan makes it harder to form the deep ties India has with America,
Britain and some Gulf countries, which Indians have been emigrating to
for decades.
The relationship also lost
an important personal element when its main architect, Abe, was
assassinated last summer. “Modi doesn’t have many friends abroad, but
Abe was an exception,” laments Dr Horimoto. In Delhi this week Mr
Kishida tried to press further along the bilateral pathway his
predecessor laid by inviting Mr Modi to attend the G7 summit in
Hiroshima in May. Japan wants to use its turn running the G7
to boost outreach to the developing world, and sees India as a key
conduit. “Without India, we can’t engage the Global South,” Mr Kanehara
says.
That is testament to just how far
the relationship has progressed, despite its various areas of
shortfall. Asia’s democracies stand increasingly united across the
region’s two great seas. India and Japan sit at their south-western and
north-eastern extremes—and fear of Chinese assertiveness lies at the
confluence.■