Sanjaya Baru | Why Shinzo Abe emerged as Japan’s most significant PM

Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose tragic assassination on July 8 was mourned all around the world, has been widely referred to as the island nation’s “most consequential” head of government. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had referred to him as a “personal friend” and not just as a friend of India. Indeed, there are few world leaders who have had a genuinely warm personal relationship with both Mr Modi and Dr Singh, given the very different personality of the two PMs. Therein lies the secret of Abe’s importance to the new Japan-India relationship.

At the purely government-to-government level, the India-Japan relationship went through its ups and downs over the past 70 years. Interestingly, till Abe’s first official visit to India in 2007, the most memorable visit of a post-war Japanese PM was that of Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who came in 1957. Jawaharlal Nehru played host in his inimitable manner and established a firm bond between two newly-established countries that have had long historical associations. Years earlier Nehru had written in his Glimpses of World History how Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 had inspired Indian freedom fighters because it was the first time in centuries that an Asian nation had worsted a European one.

Nehru would also have been familiar with the enormous praise that Japan’s modernisation and rapid industrialisation, in the 19th century, had elicited from such great Indian leaders as Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, M. Vishwesvarayya and Jamsetji Tata, after their visits to Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet, the Cold War kept the two Asian nations apart. After the Cold War ended, Japan was seduced by China’s rising and expanding home market and industrial opportunity, and so through the 1990s it ignored India, focusing on China.

India’s decision to declare itself a nuclear weapons power in May 1998 made matters worse with Japan imposing sanctions, citing its principled opposition to nuclear weapons. In December 1998 the Atal Behari Vajpayee government sponsored the visit to Japan of a non-official delegation which included strategic affairs guru K. Subrahmanyam, defence analyst Jasjit Singh, former defence secretary N.N. Vohra, retired diplomat Arjun Asrani and this writer. Our task was to convince Japanese think tanks and public opinion of the merits of the Indian case. Abe was one of the few Japanese officials willing to lend an ear at that time to an Indian voice, including that of an Indian diplomat then posted in Tokyo, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who is now India’s external affairs minister.

In 2000 the first steps were taken when Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Yoshiro Mori signed a joint statement designating each other’s nations as “global partners”. In April 2005 Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Junichiro Koizumi defined the bilateral relationship as both “global and strategic”. This was the turning point. They outlined an “eight-fold initiative” for enhanced cooperation that included a high-level strategic dialogue; comprehensive economic engagement; cooperation in science and technology and strengthening of people-to-people contacts; and, joining forces in dealing with the challenges and opportunities of what they termed as the new “Asian era”.

While Mori and Koizumi laid the foundations of the new India-Japan relationship, along with Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, it was Abe who conceived the architecture of the total edifice when he addressed the Indian Parliament in August 2005. “The Pacific and the Indian Oceans are now bringing about a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity. A ‘broader Asia’ that broke away geographical boundaries is now beginning to take on a distinct form. Our two countries have the ability — and the responsibility — to ensure that it broadens yet further and to nurture and enrich these seas to become seas of clearest transparence.” This is a speech worth reading even today. (It is available here)

Two statistics worth noting. Till 2006, the curve of inward Japanese investment into India was virtually flat. After 2007 it rose sharply. Till 2005 the total number of annual visits to India of Japanese ministers were in the single digits — in fact no more than four or five. After 2005 there was a sharp increase with as many as 20 to 25 ministers visiting India. Abe was the author of this enhanced official engagement with India. Finally, Abe gave a new direction to Asian security architecture and India’s external security environment by promoting the concept of the “Indo-Pacific”. His “confluence of the two seas” speech laid out the framework for what has since been termed the Indo-Pacific and built the basis for the constitution of the Quadrilateral Security Initiative, otherwise known as the “Quad”.

While India and Japan are the real pillars of the Indo-Pacific region, their bilateral relationship should be defined sui generis rather than in a regional geopolitical context. The geo-economic synergy between Japan, which is a high-tech but an ageing, labour deficient economy, and India, a developing economy in need of technology and saddled with a young labour force, is fairly obvious. Japan needs land, raw materials and labour. India needs technology and investment. Both need each other’s markets. The synergy is elf-evident.

Moreover, India is one of the few major countries that carries no negative historical baggage with regard to Japan. Both Western nations and many of Japan’s neighbours like to remind Japan of its imperial and war-time past. They have been critical of Abe’s policy of reviving Japan’s military power. India would like to see Japan normalised as an Asian democracy with military capabilities. If the imperialist powers of the West would like all post-colonial developing nations to let bygones be bygones and seek to redefine their relations on the basis of shared democratic values, why cannot Japan expect the same? Every country has a past that it seeks to forget. Reviving Japan’s military capabilities, and even allowing Japan to become a declared nuclear power, is in the interests of regional stability in Asia. If the world has come to terms with the nuclear status of China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, why not Japan?