A comprehensive partnership

India-Japan relations matter more than before

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to New Delhi has considerable importance, given the breadth and depth of India-Japan relations. This relationship has historically been strongest in the economic sphere: Japanese corporations have been big investors in India and Japanese agencies have been a major source of infrastructure finance. For Tokyo, India remains a major economic and geo-economic partner — though Japanese policymakers have also felt let down by India’s unwillingness to not only refuse to enter the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, but also its cold shoulder to the trade vertical of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Indian policymakers should prioritise explaining the country’s new approach to trade and openness to their Japanese counterparts, given the centrality of the economic partnership.

Yet, as is perhaps inevitable, given the neighbourhood the two countries share, the strategic component of the relations has expanded vastly in the past decades, and particularly since the late Shinzo Abe began to dominate the politics of Japan and its ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Mr Kishida was viewed — and sought to define himself as being — more of a liberal and less of a hawk than the Abe wing of his party. But, in practice, he has continued the former Prime Minister’s foreign policy, defined in particular around a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. This foreign policy accepts the importance of the US as a major security guarantor in the region, but also recognises that Japan, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and India have a major role to play in their collective security and in managing the rise of China. Mr Kishida and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have a shared interest in promoting the stability of a region that is continually destabilised by Beijing’s increasingly aggressive and irredentist actions.

India and Japan are also presidents of the G20 and G7, respectively, this year. India has been invited as an observer to the G7 summit in Tokyo later this year. Co-operation between the two groupings is essential on both development and security fronts. Recent G7 proposals for climate finance and transition finance, as well as reforming multilateral development banks like the World Bank, will have to be decided eventually by the G20 if they are to take hold. The G7 also believes the future links between environmental barriers and trade openness will have to come through “climate clubs”, in which countries lower trade barriers if and only if they share similar approaches to emissions. This is also a question that will have to be taken up by the G20 under India’s presidency. New Delhi is aware that the leaders’ summit in September needs to show at least the minimal coherence demonstrated in Bali under Indonesia’s presidency last year. Divisions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appear to have become even deeper since then, as underlined by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s current visit to Moscow. Japan, as president of the G7, is therefore a crucial partner in trying to ensure that the richer countries in the G20 are on board with India’s efforts at hammering out a consensus on issues beyond the war. Mr Kishida left New Delhi for an unannounced visit to Kyiv, demonstrating Tokyo’s greater involvement in security issues.