Rayees Ahmad Lone
(Senior Research Analyst at Prime Research India)
Article 9 of the Japan’s Constitution outlaws war as an option to settle international disputes. And rightly so, the trajectory of inter-state developments in Japan ever since 1940’s has seen tremendous growth. The state has embarked the new era of tech and infrastructural revolution with countries all around the world eying for alignment on different political, strategic and socio-economic domains.
India being one such ally has a long history of healthy relations with Japan rooted with strong cultural and civilizational ties that began in 752 AD when the Indian monk Bodhisena visited Japan. Indian culture, rippled with Buddhism, has also had a great deal of impact on Japanese culture. The contemporary times have seen prominent Indian political figures like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Swami Vivekananda, Nobel laurate Rabindranath Tagore etc. associated with Japan.
On 28th April 1952 when India and Japan signed a peace treaty, the treaty was one of the first peace treaties signed by Japan after World War II waving off whatever reparations were implied on her. It gave the Japanese a ray of hope and set grounds between the two nations for the forth coming future endeavours of economic cooperation and diplomatic relations.
Furthermore, acknowledging mutual political and strategic interests and emerging security challenges, the Indo-Japan partnership has gradually evolved through years into a stronger sacred alliance with deepening ties. Today as we commemorate sixty-six years of diplomatic relations between these two great nations of Asia Pacific, it is noteworthy that this relationship derives its unique strength from the immutable bonds of history, culture religion and civilizational connect that transcends the space-time fabric.
Current Socioeconomic Dynamics
Economic cooperation is a dominant feature of India- Japan bilateral relationship. India remains the largest recipient of the Japanese ODA (Official Development Assistance), a flagship for infrastructure development projects with regards to transport, water supply, irrigation, environment, technology, health and people-to-people exchanges. The partnership extends to projects in the strategically sensitive regions of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the north-eastern region of India, where government is stringent about allowing foreign Investment.
Japanese NEC Corporation has been contracted to install an under-sea cable from Chennai to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands while Tokyo is also involved in road connectivity projects linking India’s north-eastern states to neighbouring ASEAN countries. Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail Corridor (Bullet Train) is one of the newly signed giant Infrastructural agreement on high-speed rail connectivity.
India and Japan also inked a Digital partnership that includes the establishment of a start-up hub in Bangalore, mutual investments support, collaboration on digital infrastructure and system designs, partnership in IT human resources, research and development, as well as next-generation networks in the year 2018.
Intermingling the strengths of Japanese hardware capabilities and India’s software and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) expertise also presents tremendous growth opportunities and could also mitigate urgent domestic challenges in an era that promises increasing digitalization and potential technological disruptions. The expansive Indian population can also plug the labour-crunch in Japan since Japan currently faces a serious demographic challenge, with rapidly aging and shrinking population.
Synergies with Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue)
The quadrilateral agreement (also known as “Quad”) between America, Australia, Japan and India has seen a revival post the covid19 pandemic with Australia joining the back the alignment. It has recently been in the news for a variety of reasons ranging from countering China’s questionable actions since the outbreak of the virus and its surface and subsurface activities in the Indian Ocean beyond the Malacca Straits. This is a big red flag for countries like India and Japan
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lately brought about the concept of Asia’s ‘Democratic Security Diamond’ for the second time to safeguard the maritime commons from the Indian Ocean to the western pacific of the quad nations, an equally critical move. A positive externality of the crisis that has laid bare the urgency with which nations in the broader Asian region must act.
The recent developments in India have seen a level of strategic convergence between Delhi and Tokyo that can be gauged from t6he fact that after India invited the Japanese Navy in 2014 to participate in the annual Malabar exercises with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific waters, reviving an earlier practice of joint India-U.S.-Japan trilateral exercises. These are very significant movesconsidering the fact that it can help the two nations in maintaining peace and stability in region post the new world order following the pandemic
With changing geopolitical realities post Covid-19, the need of an hour is to push for greater engagement with such like-minded nations. India and Japan both set an example on how regional cooperation on different strategic, political and socio-economic domains could help nations thrive in future.
The author is a freelance writer and Senior Analyst PRIME Research | India. He can be reached at
| Rayees AhmadLone rayees.ahmadlone@prime-research.com |
(o) +91-124-6697626 (M) +91-7006406711
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