Asia’s biggest democracy and its richest one were on opposite sides in the cold war. Yet in recent years India and Japan have improved their ties, aiming to forge a democratic counterweight to China
, a once stop-start grouping that was revived in 2017. The Indian and Japanese armed forces exercise together increasingly often; they conducted their first joint fighter jet drills earlier this year.
The partnership has some useful underpinnings. Officials in both countries point to their shared tradition of Buddhism. In 1948 Radhabinod Pal, an Indian judge, became a hero for Japanese nationalists when he cast the lone dissenting vote at the Tokyo trials, in which Japanese imperial leaders were convicted of war crimes. There are some personal ties between the countries’ elites: India’s influential foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, is married to a Japanese woman, Kyoko.
The Japanese imprint extends underground: Delhi’s metro was built with Japanese help. Japanese firms are also helping plan a high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, a project close to the heart of the Indian prime minister. And they have helped build infrastructure in India’s long-neglected north-east—in part to counter growing Chinese involvement in the region, says Horimoto Takenori, a Japanese scholar of India.
Abe also failed to persuade India to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a big Asian trade pact that China participates in. Even now, as investors look to diversify from China, it is striking how rarely Japanese ones are involved in key Indian sectors such as ports, airports and energy, reckons Dhruva Jaishankar of the Observer Research Foundation America, the American offshoot of a Delhi-based think-tank. On defence and security, too, ties amount to less than meet the eye.
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