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Feel-good paradigm in India-Japan ties

Is there more to the timing of the latest round of India-Japan strategic dialogue than meets the eye? A transparent and credible answer is that the dialogue in Tokyo on July 3 was not designed to send any political signal to China.

Doubts on this score arose because the meeting took place in the wake of China’s recent comments on its boundary dispute with India. The context of these comments on June 18 was the Asian Development Bank’s adoption of the India Country Partnership Strategy for 2009-2012. Beijing voiced “strong dissatisfaction” over the bank’s move, which was seen by China to cover territories in dispute with India. Beijing said the move “can neither change the existence of immense territorial disputes between China and India nor China’s fundamental position on its border issues with India.”

The July 3 meeting in Tokyo, in reality the third round of discussions on strategic issues of interest to India and Japan, was indeed an annual exercise. And, it is learnt on good authority in both these camps that China’s comments did not figure in this dialogue as a factor in Japan-India ties.

External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna left Tokyo on July 5 after co-chairing the talks, which were marked by a feel-good paradigm.

At a macro-level, inter-state talks on strategic issues have in fact become a commonplace practice in worldwide diplomacy since the end of Cold War. In this perspective, the latest India-Japan dialogue need not necessarily be seen as being particularly important. Yet, a substantive fact is best summed up in the words of External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash. According to him, the “canvas of cooperation [between India and Japan] has its own story to tell.”

A top Japanese official, Kazuo Kodama, who was present at Mr. Krishna’s talks with his counterpart Hirofumi Nakasone, was no less eloquent. Mr. Kodama told The Hindu about his perception of “a meeting of minds” between the two Ministers on the issue of worldwide nuclear disarmament. This perception is important. Even a nodding acquaintance with the India-Japan link will suffice to know how much this view is a positive element of their feel-good commitment.

It was just over a decade ago that Japan took an apocalyptic view of India’s nuclear-arms tests and imposed economic sanctions on it in that context. By contrast, today’s growing convergence of the views of these two countries on the idea of pan-global nuclear disarmament merits attention. This does not really signify a seismic shift in the positions of either country on the issue of worldwide non-proliferation since New Delhi’s tests of 1998. A signpost for the Japan-India dialogue now is the view, first aired by the United States just a few years ago, that New Delhi is a responsible power.

In this changed context, New Delhi’s nuclear weapons are not exactly an irritant in the overall Japan-India engagement, of which the strategic dialogue is a part. With a heavy heart and a pragmatic world-view, pacifist Japan backed the recent U.S.-led pro-India consensus in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Nonetheless, Tokyo does not still take its eyes off New Delhi’s ongoing voluntary moratorium on nuclear-weapon tests.

Relevant to Japan’s continuing watch over India is the latest Group of Eight (G8) statement on non-proliferation. Japan is a proactive G8 member. India is at risk of being covered under the G8 move to “reduce the proliferation risks associated with the spread of enrichment and reprocessing facilities, equipment, and technology.”

On balance, surely, the nuclear issue is not the defining feature of the Japan-India strategic dialogue today. Yet, their new “meeting of minds” on global-scale nuclear disarmament is particularly important to Japan, still a pacifist on the atomic arms issue. In a sense, this “meeting of minds” sets a robust tone for the larger bilateral engagement on a host of smart-power issues. Smart-power, as first propounded by Joseph Nye, is a blending of hard-power of the military kind and soft-power of diplomacy and people-to-people influences.

The overall agenda for Japan-India strategic dialogue is vast indeed. This is so on two counts: the scope of this bilateral exercise itself and the broad definition of a generic inter-state engagement of this kind. Generically, the issues include the economic well-being of people, eco-friendly development, energy security, and international peace and stability.

A “Strategic and Global Partnership” (SGP), agreed to by Japan and India several years ago, is effectively a stimulus package for dialogue. For Tokyo, with its calculus of measured diplomacy, the SGP signifies a leap in state-sponsored goodwill for discussions and also cooperation. In fact, the SGP was reached through a two-stage accord, the engagement on issues of global concern being the second step in that process. In effect, the SGP now provides for India-Japan talks, aimed at specific agreements, on cooperation in the bilateral and multilateral domains.

The Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation (JDSC), a by-product of the SGP stimulus, served as another framework for the just-concluded dialogue. In fact, the JDSC, arguably a security pact of a secondary nature, is one of only a few such agreements that Japan has with major powers. With the JDSC issued well before the latest dialogue, Tokyo now has parallel security-related links with the U.S., Australia, and India. The qualitative content and material scope of these accords vary vastly. With the U.S. recently reaffirming its promise of an “extended nuclear deterrence,” Japan remains assured of the American umbrella in this area.

In this issue-studded setting, India and Japan did not outline any specific accord at this time for space-related cooperation, a futuristic possibility. In the terrestrial domain, the promise of a new dialogue on cooperation for maritime security was held out. This was the farthest the two sides went, after having recently held a sophisticated naval exercise, which involved the U.S. as well. Nor did India announce any move to associate itself with the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative. Japan is active in this Initiative, which is in focus again because of the international crisis over North Korea’s latest nuclear and missile tests.

China, besides the U.S., is the prime power with worldwide interests in Japan’s neighbourhood. While Tokyo’s links with Washington are of interest or concern to China, India cannot be in such a category for a specific reason. The Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) constellation is taking shape now, although it is not yet in focus in Japan’s neighbourhood. Nonetheless, Tokyo, proud of its membership of the elite Group of Seven countries, sees the BRIC forum as being compatible with the G-7.

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