- Monday, March 10, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has visited Japan to attend the state funeral of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who the former had held as his “dear friend”. The two nations witnessed considerable deepening in the ties of the two Asian democracies under the leadership of Modi and Abe. The latter, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, stepped down in 2020 on health grounds, ending the ‘partnership’ that was treasured both by New Delhi and Tokyo.
The way Modi expressed his grief for Abe after his assassination in the city of Nara in Japan in July showed that he had a genuine affection for the late Japanese leader who had given a special focus on relations with India and set the stage for strategic ties with his idea of the Indo-Pacific region. In fact, it was Abe who had introduced the term during an address to the Indian parliament in 2007 and since then, it has been taken up by the region’s democracies as a key geographic framework as far as the improvement in their mutual ties is concerned.
With Abe now gone, the onus is now on Modi to continue with the legacy of that flourishing partnership. He has exchanged short trips with current Japanese prime minister Kishida Fumio and now, given the latter has tried to strengthen his country’s ties through a ‘funeral diplomacy’, India also has the responsibility to ensure that its ties with Japan sees a energetic revival.
While there have been areas of Japan extending technological help to India in times of Abe, like supporting the construction of Modi’s ambitious bullet train project, and military cooperation in the form of joint defence exercises, India and Japan have also been brought together by a common concern for China. Both the Asian powers who are members of the Quad group, have found themselves at the receiving end of China’s aggressive territorial stances — be it in the Himalayas or the East China Sea.
There are a whole lot of areas, therefore, where India needs Japan’s help and boost its plan such as ‘Make in India’. Japan has also provided around $177 million (£164 million) to support construction of a 19-kilometre-long bridge in India’s northeast, where other nations are not welcomed.
But while these are areas where India and Japan are close, there are also factors that divide them. For example, while Japan has imposed sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine war, India has not condemned Moscow over its adventurism in the East European nation. India’s attachment to Russia is also something that Japan is not too comfortable with.
Bilateral trade between the two nations has been slow in developing despite the warmth. Last fiscal, the volumes of their trade reached a little over $20 billion (£18.4 billion), which is much less than that between India and China. Japan aimed to generate 5 trillion yen in investments in India — state and private — over the next five years during Kishida’s visit to India in March.
Modi, thus, has an important role to play in extending the same warmth that India-Japan relations had seen during Abe’s tenure. It might not return to the same level under Abe’s successor but there is always an opportunity for Modi and Kishida to inject a new energy into them.
