Fear of China is pushing India and Japan into each other’s arms, Economist, Mar. 19, 2023.
Asia’s biggest and richest democracies are close. They could be much closer
The mughal prince Dara Shikoh was beheaded in 1659 after publishing a scandalous book, “The Confluence of the Two Seas”, in which he identified a spiritual affinity between Hinduism and Islam. In 2007 Abe Shinzo, then Japan’s prime minister, borrowed the book’s title for a stirring speech to India’s parliament in which he called for the Indian and Pacific oceans to be seen as one strategic space, and for Japan and India to recognise their shared interests. Those ideas, the basis for taking an expansive Indo-Pacific view of Asian security, are now widely accepted among Western strategists. “Without the Japan-India relationship, there is no Indo-Pacific,” says Kenneth Juster, America’s ambassador to India from 2017 to 2021. “That relationship is vital to why we have this concept, and to the future of the region.”
Kishida Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, endorsed that on March 20th during a two-day visit to Delhi. “India is the place where the Free and Open Indo-Pacific came into being,” he declared. Asia’s biggest democracy and its richest one were on opposite sides in the cold war. But over the past decade and a half they have dramatically improved their diplomatic, economic and security ties. Their aim is to forge a democratic counterweight to China. And their progress, as Mr Kishida and Narendra Modi also stressed in Delhi, will be conspicuous in international diplomacy this year, with Japan chairing the g7 and India the g20. The Japanese and Indian leaders spoke of trying to improve co-ordination between the two groupings.
(To be continued)