Post-liberalisation, Japan, India see each other in new light

That India and Japan finalised and signed a clutch of crucial agreements during Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit was incidental.

Business leaders, politicians and bureaucrats "" all those accompanying Abe said the most important gain of the trip was the new light in which Japan and India saw each other.

Although the pervasive gripe among business leaders continued to be the lack of infrastructure in India "" no water, no power, bad roads "" the chairman of the Board of Toyota Motor Corporation, Fujio Cho, bowed to India's very own Jagdish Khattar over lunch and told Business Standard, "I am learning a lot from this visit and persons like Khattar-san."

"We have seen what India is like. We have interacted, discussed and agreed that enhancing bilateral economic relations is essential. We consider India an opportunity. In the delegation are businessmen from manufacturing industry, financial institutions, trading houses and several sectors," Cho said.

The CEOs in the business delegation were few. Representation was at the level of chairman or non-official directors, but nevertheless the most important figures in Japanese companies, Khattar explained.

"I found a representative of an oil company sitting next to me at lunch, a first-timer to India. He said, 'I am amazed at India's dynamism'. For Japan, it is not China, it is India and its growth, markets and unlimited opportunity. And it is Prime Minister Abe who is driving this," he said.

What Shinzo Abe flagged during his visit, and what he did not, is equally telling. In his speech at the joint session of Parliament, he did not mention the nuclear issue. Instead, he dwelt at length on global warming.

His aides, who spoke of Tokyo's likely support for India for nuclear fuel supplies from the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG), were looking at nuclear energy through green glasses. "We understand India's need for energy and how important it is for India to have clean energy to reduce global warming,'' they said.

In a beautifully crafted speech in Parliament, Abe emphasised the need for a strategic partnership between India and Japan and also taking the bilateral trade to $20 billion by 2010.

But his delegation was openly sceptical of this. Sunil Bharti Mittal said tactfully that it were the Japanese themselves who were responsible for this.

Pointing out that Japanese businessmen were the first to come to India in the 1980s, he said that after their sudden flight, that space had since been occupied by a host of other countries.

Ever practical, Mittal observed, "Unless Delhi and Tokyo have an open skies agreement between them it will be extremely difficult for business leaders to even fly into each other's countries."

What do the Japanese people marvel at most while in India? This was Shinzo Abe's question to Indian parliamentarians. He answered the question himself: Bharatnatyam and Kathak.

He described these dance forms as "contrasts of the static and dynamic" and used the metaphor to describe Indo-Japan relations. "We "" India and Japan "" want to become partners who exhibit this type of perfect match with each other."