Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had travelled to Japan and Malaysia for bilateral visits and to Vietnam for the 8th ASEAN-India Summit last November, has made it clear that his government’s foreign-policy priority will be East and Southeast Asia, which are poised for sustained growth in the 21st century.
This is a time of great turmoil in the Asian strategic landscape and India is trying to make itself relevant to the regional states. The standoff between Japan and China over a boat collision last year underscored a more aggressive stance being adopted by the Communist state against rivals and US allies in Asia, and there may be more tension to come. With its political and economic rise, Beijing has started dictating the boundaries of acceptable behaviour to its neighbours, thereby laying bare the costs of great power politics. The US and its allies have already started re-assessing their regional strategies and a loose anti-China balancing coalition has started emerging.
Both Tokyo and New Delhi have made an effort in recent years to put Indo-Japanese ties in high gear. The rise of China in the Asia-Pacific and beyond has fundamentally altered the strategic calculus of India and Japan, forcing them to rethink their attitudes towards each other. India’s booming economy is making it an attractive trading and business partner for Japan, as Japan tries to get itself out of its long years of economic stagnation.
Japan is also re-assessing its role as a security provider in the region and beyond, and of all its neighbours, India seems most willing to acknowledge Japan’s centrality in shaping the evolving Asia-Pacific security architecture. Moreover, a new generation of political leaders in India and Japan are viewing each other differently, breaking from past policies, thereby changing the trajectory of India-Japan relations.
India’s ties with Japan have come a long way since May 1998, when a chill had set in after India’s nuclear tests, with Japan imposing sanctions and suspending its overseas development assistance. Since then, however, the changing strategic milieu in Asia-Pacific has brought the two countries together, so much so that the last visit of the Indian prime minister to Japan resulted in the unfolding of a roadmap to transform a low-key relationship into a major strategic partnership.
The rise of China is a major factor in the evolution of Indo-Japanese ties, as is the US attempt to build India into a major balancer in the region. Both India and Japan are well aware of China’s not-so-subtle attempts at preventing their rise. An India-Japan civil nuclear pact would be critical in signalling that they would like to build a partnership to bring stability to the region at a time when China is going all out to reward Pakistan with civilian nuclear reactors, putting the entire non-proliferation regime in jeopardy.
The talks on the civilian nuclear pact, however, seem to be going nowhere at the moment, with the two sides merely agreeing to speed up talks. Japan continues to insist that India sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), whereas India has no intention of doing so given its long-standing concerns regarding the discriminatory nature of these treaties. Meanwhile, the new liability law in India could make greater civilian nuclear cooperation between Japan and India more difficult to accomplish.
Trade was also the focus of the Indian Prime Minister’s visit to Malaysia. Making a strong pitch for greater Malaysian investment in India, Singh and his Malaysian counterpart signed an array of agreements aimed at galvanising bilateral economic cooperation and liberalising their respective investment regimes to facilitate greater foreign direct investment into each other’s territory. The security partnership between the two is also being strengthened with the decision to explore possibilities of collaborative projects in the defence sector and enhance cooperation in counter-terrorism through information-sharing and establishment of a joint working group.
In Hanoi, India made a strong case for its growing relevance in the East Asian regional security and economic architecture at the 8th ASEAN-India Summit, where the focus was on enhancing the integration of the East Asian region with India. India’s Free Trade Agreement with ASEAN, signed last year, committed New Delhi to bring down import tariffs on 80 per cent of the commodities it traded with ASEAN. This allows India to challenge China’s growing penetration of East Asia and prevents India’s growing marginalisation in the world’s most economically dynamic region in the world.
After signing a free trade pact in goods, India and ASEAN are now engaged in talks to widen the agreement to include services and investments. India hopes to increase its $44-billion trade with the ASEAN to $50 billion by next year. Indonesia remains a key player in India’s Look East policy and it has played a key role in enhancing India’s ties with ASEAN. By having given the Indonesian President the honour of being the chief guest in the Republic Day celebration, India has underlined the need for greater India-Indonesia cooperation in the years to come.
India is pursuing an ambitious policy in East Asia aimed at increasing its regional profile more significantly than before. China’s presence is already changing the regional landscape and smaller states in the region are now looking to India to act as a balancer in view of China’s growing prowess and America’s likely retrenchment from the region in the near future. It remains to be seen if India can indeed live up to the full potential of its own possibilities in the region.
The author is with the department of defence studies, King’s College London
