Abe looks to cash in on Modi friendship through trade deals
NEW DELHI: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s personal friendship with Indian counterpart Narendra Modi is starting to yield more tangible results, with the nations close to signing deals on defence equipment and India’s first high-speed rail link.
On a three-day visit to the world’s biggest democracy this weekend, Mr Abe will seek to nail down some concrete achievements to counter China’s increasing assertiveness in the region. The nations have a long way to go: Trade between them is about 5% of China’s commerce with Japan, and less than a quarter of its transactions with India.
“The relationship between India and Japan is perhaps the best it has ever been, largely because they have prime ministers who look at the region and the world in very similar terms,” said Harsh Pant, professor of international relations at King’s College London. “They are very nationalistic, centre-right prime ministers who have a certain idea about the rise of China and about its implications for both these states.”
The close personal ties between the two leaders are helping bring the countries closer. Mr Modi is one of a handful of people whom Mr Abe follows on Twitter, where the pair occasionally exchange public messages. When Mr Modi visited Japan last year, Mr Abe took the unusual step of showing him around the ancient capital of Kyoto. This week, after their fifth formal summit, they are set to visit Varanasi for a Hindu ritual at the Ganges River.
Mr Abe was to arrive yesterday for a meeting with Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj before addressing a seminar at a hotel in New Delhi. Today he meets with business leaders and India’s president before he meets Mr Modi for a summit and trip to Varanasi.
The courtship is part of Japan’s effort to broaden its network of informal allies to balance China’s activities in the region — a step towards Mr Abe’s blueprint for a “security diamond” of regional democracies that includes the US and Australia. For its part, India has been more assertive toward China in recent months, drawing up plans to develop a disputed region along their border and echoing language used by the US and Japan to criticise Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.
Japan and India’s foreign ministers underscored their concern over China in a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry in September. The three countries made a statement calling for freedom of navigation and overflight, as well as unimpeded lawful commerce, including in the South China Sea. In October, the nations held a naval drill in the Bay of Bengal.
While neither Japan nor India has a claim in the dispute over the South China Sea, both see parallels with their own situation. Coastguard ships from Japan and China regularly tail one another around islets disputed between the two countries in the East China Sea, while border tensions linger between India and China, which fought a four-week war in 1962 over their Himalayan border.
Mr Abe’s enthusiasm for India dates back almost a decade to when he was prime minister the first time around. Even so, the two countries have yet to hold the kind of top level “two plus two” meetings of defence and foreign ministers that Japan holds with the US, Australia and several other countries. Sensitivities over India’s nuclear weapons programme have hampered attempts to cooperate on atomic energy, while a proposed transfer of Japan’s US-2 amphibian planes has made slow progress.
Other areas look more promising. India appears set to agree this weekend to adopt Japanese technology for a 505km rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad following discussions started by Mr Abe and Mr Modi’s predecessors in 2012. Japan is offering a loan to cover 81% of the 980-billion-rupee (US$14.6 billion, 528 billion baht) cost. A deal would help restore Japanese pride after it lost out to China on a separate $5-billion rail deal in Indonesia, and relieve pressure on Mr Modi to accelerate the modernisation of his country.
“The Shinkansen is a symbol of Japanese industry,” said Koji Kobayashi, a senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute in Tokyo, referring to Japan’s bullet train. “If it is adopted in India, it will be good public relations for the government and will play well with the Japanese public. Particularly after the loss to China in Indonesia, it would be a great souvenir to bring back.”
Even as the India-Japan relationship blossoms, Mr Modi has taken care to maintain friendly ties with President Xi Jinping while Mr Abe has also worked to overcome tensions with China. Still, Mr Pant from King’s College London says, Mr Modi is a leader who can help justify Mr Abe’s longtime optimism toward India.