India and Japan forge strategic bonds

The geostrategic map of Asia changed on Friday with Japan and India signing a civil nuclear agreement on the lines of the India-US agreement concluded in 2008, which had permitted India to break out of the nuclear straightjacket and engage in trade in nuclear materials — such as reactors and nuclear fuel — without being a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which India has long held to be discriminatory. The warming of India’s ties with Japan since the days of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, which gained particular intensity under PM Manmohan Singh, helped lay out the strategic dimensions of the India-Japan discourse in the post-Soviet period, but Tokyo had remained firm on not selling nuclear materials to India on account of its strong pacifist record since Japan is the world’s only country to have suffered a nuclear attack in 1945 (at the hands of the US).

Years of engagement bore fruit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Tokyo inking the deal with his counterpart Shinzo Abe on Friday. India now becomes the only non-NPT signatory with which Japan has reached an agreement to transfer nuclear supplies. Of course, this is strictly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and for clean power generation in the context of the wider discussion on climate change. India’s agreement with the US had remained non-functional because, among other reasons, the Westinghouse reactors that the US would supply were built in collaboration with Hitachi. That roadblock has now been removed. Under this pact, as in the case with the civil nuclear compact with America, Japan can terminate the agreement if India tests nuclear weapons. But this assurance had long been supplied by New Delhi right through its nuclear discussion with Japan.

Tokyo has also long been aware of India’s impeccable NPT record. What’s turned the discussion now is the closer strategic bonding between the two countries. It appears evident that the India-Japan agreement has come with the understanding that the rise of China in a forceful, thrusting manner, which has raised concerns all round in China’s neighbourhood — Japan and India included — is the elephant in the room for both countries, and New Delhi and Tokyo are seeking to cooperate and taking defensive action. Before Mr Modi landed in Tokyo, Beijing let it be known that a common understanding between India and Japan on China’s hectoring attitude in the South China Sea would hurt India — a veiled warning to New Delhi not to forge strategic links with Tokyo. This has not worked. Indeed, as the joint statement shows, the two partners indirectly ticked off China for not doing enough to contain cross-border terrorism in South Asia.