<b>Agnikalam:</b> India's strategy - both Japan and China? The answer is no!

We need to reduce our trade deficit with China and make a clear turn exclusively towards Japan

Mr Modi recently visited Japan which was followed quickly by a visit to India by the Chinese President. Both promised India considerable FDI, China predictably more than Japan. Mr Modi's ease of manner with the Japanese Prime Minister gave Indians yet another proof of the former's ability to reach out. His confident manner with the Chinese President gave them reassurance in particular as he did not shy away from raising the border issue. Which of the two is a surer and safer option for India to partner with?

India's risk and uncertainty in engaging with China are obviously linked to the inevitability of China being a bad neighbour. Numerous and increasingly intensifying incursions are occurring across the Indian border, the most recent during the President's visit. The blatant objective, declared by their army, was to build strategic border roads. It was followed by the President's statement upon return exhorting the army to prepare for a regional war. It is unlikely that the reference was only to the South China Sea. It could comprise the Ides of March for India if it commits the folly of letting such mongering pass.

The risk is also associated with China's long-standing approach in sharing responsibility in global growth before the global economic crisis and, after, with its resistance to fair burden sharing. Table 1 reveals some stark contrasts that have emerged over three decades from the 1980s. Between 1981-2013, India's GDP increased from $19.7 thousand crore to $188 thousand crore, and China's from $19.4 thousand crore (lower than India's) to $924 thousand crore (about five times India's). Japan's GDP grew from $120 thousand crore (more than six times India or China) to $490 thousand crore (half of China and two and a half times India's).

China's phenomenal growth compared to Japan and even more so in relation to India is not strictly admirable in terms of human rights or international trade. The decades-long absence of labour rights is finally resulting in selective manifestation of labour unrest, albeit quickly crushed every time. The absence of political rights was recently manifest in emotional student protests in Hong Kong. And the global crisis finally impelled trading partners to protest China's international market manipulation through artificially low exchange rates with the objective of pushing exports significantly above expected growth in terms of quality or technology. Consequently, it initiated a currency appreciation, albeit reluctant and slow.

Japan has been demonstrably more cooperative in international relations. The secularly high trade surplus with the United States of the 1980s was broken by its acceptance of reducing the quantum of automobile exports, a quantitative policy verboten in the context of international trade. It protested mildly that the Japanese did not appear to prefer American cars when the United States further asked why the Japanese were not importing more of them. Throughout, Japan has revealed more willingness to go along with the international community in both trade and diplomacy. Indeed, Japan's prolonged economic recession, with periods of depression, is likely to have had its origin in that period of inarguable obeisance to the United States, robbing it of a way of life established from the mid 1800s by industrial houses such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo in cooperation with Government. The squatters' park in front of the Tokyo Museum and the deserted department stores are presently its stark and constant reminders.

Post-War Japan's concept and practice of human rights are akin to those of India. It is pleasurable to see the variety of human behaviour in Tokyo's Shinjuku-ku where human hair assumes colours from the vibgyor and pedestrians are seen walking with their pictorial cellphones in front of their eyes. By contrast, seeing (twice) China's own citizens being handcuffed and ushered away from Tiananmen Square for lacking a "visa" to visit Beijing - their own national capital - cannot be erased from memory. Is it even imaginable that an Indian could be excluded by decree from Delhi? Indeed, a Delhi NGO went to court and ensured that some 80 rag-picker families would not be removed from their shacks atop a hill despite the Vasant Kunj connector remaining a bottleneck at that point. With luck, Indians should never suffer the Emergency ever again. Bedding with habituated human rights abusers is not, and should never be, Indian practice even for the direst economic reason. Those countries that have fallen prey to this fallacy will only further enable China's inexorable economic and political rise since it will continue to obfuscate and apply its own rules while the rest of the world tries to abide by globally configured principles.

Indo-Japan and Indo-China trade patterns are pointers. Figure 1 shows that, though India exports to Japan a bit less than it imports from it, in the case of China, India's imports are three and a half times its exports. Figure 2 shows India's imports and exports from and to Japan have remained similar in the last five years at about two per cent of India's global imports and exports respectively. However, in the case of China, it represents 11 per cent of India's global imports but only five per cent of India's global exports. Does India wish to become even more dependent on, and acquire a higher deficit with, China, a country that projects its naked power at every available opportunity? There is no need for India to be impolite but the clear policy should be an assiduous adherence to enhancing border security, strategic transport access through roads and airpower, and a continuing demonstration of fearlessness on the seas. And, paired with a clear turn exclusively towards Japan.

Unfortunately, India loses direly in its inability to control corruption including in Defence if wide ranging reports are given credibility while China can take quick action, including using capital punishment, to contain it. India need not replicate medieval remedies but it must control corruption for, otherwise, all arguments made above would stand on quicksand. At the moment, hopes are high that Mr Modi will improve things, perhaps even radicalise the issue. If not, it is expectable that the disaffected majority would find solutions sharper than Naxalism.