C. Raja Mohan on the Japanese foreign minister’s Delhi visit this week
The arrival of Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso today will launch 2006’s diplomatic season in the capital as well as help develop a more productive nuclear conversation between the two countries. With the UPA government’s political attention now riveted upon implementing the historic nuclear deal with the US, Delhi would like Tokyo’s support in winning the all too important international endorsement of the pact.
The visit is expected to produce decisions on imparting a strategic perspective to routine foreign office consultations and bridging the nuclear divide between the two countries.
Aso, who belongs to a new breed of politicians representing the growing national self-confidence in Japan, has got into trouble elsewhere in Asia for his frank talk. Beijing recently pilloried him for calling China a military threat to the region. India has no desire intrude into growing Sino-Japanese tensions. India’s relations with both have long been underdeveloped. India is determined to advance its ties with both Asian powers.
As someone keen to inject some substance into talks on Indo-Japanese strategic partnership, Aso is a welcome visitor to New Delhi. That he is a leading contender to replace Junichiro Koizumi as Japan’s premier later this year also lends special significance to Aso’s brief India sojourn.
Aso has consciously chosen India as his first destination for a bilateral visit in Asia. India is all set to reciprocate with warmth.
When he came to Delhi last April, Koizumi signed a strategic partnership agreement with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. At the highest level in Tokyo, an old political ambivalence about relations with India has come to an end. Delhi would, however, like to see some real results from strategic partnership. And that precisely is where the nuclear issue comes into focus. Japan did not oppose the Indo-US nuclear pact at the meeting of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group late last year. But it was among the countries that vigorously questioned the Bush administration on the implications of the pact.
India is well aware of the non-proliferation fundamentalism in Japan. In the wake of its tests in May 1998, India found the reaction from Tokyo was one of the harshest. All the attempts to overcome Indo-Japanese nuclear divergence yielded nothing as both sides could not get beyond reaffirming their basic positions. Aso now wants to find some common nuclear ground with India.
Despite not being a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, India sees itself as a responsible nuclear weapon state. The acceptance of this proposition by the United States is at the very foundation of the Indo-US nuclear pact. India would like Japan to move in the same direction.
India and Japan have strong stakes in preventing further proliferation of nuclear weapons in Asia. The security of both countries has been affected by the clandestine nuclear and missile proliferation between Pakistan and North Korea.
Indian and Japanese naval forces could work together to interdict illicit trafficking in weapons of mass destruction and related material on the high seas.
When India does get onto the international market for civilian nuclear cooperation after the pact with the US is clinched, Japan could be an important source of atomic technology. Under pressure from industry to liberalise the policy on nuclear exports, Japan has begun to sell reactor components and sub-assemblies to other nations. South Africa has been one recent beneficiary.
Tokyo is some psychological distance away from exporting full reactors to anyone, let alone India. But a range of civilian nuclear energy cooperation — from nuclear safety to the R&D of a new generation of reactors — could easily be considered by the two sides.
Like in Washington, sections of the Tokyo bureaucracy are strongly opposed to the Indo-US nuclear pact and reluctant to consider atomic energy cooperation with Delhi.
However, amidst a rapidly changing Asian security environment and the transformation of Japanese politics, it should be possible for Delhi and Tokyo to construct a bolder agenda for bilateral cooperation.
