India-Japan cooperation being built around de-risking shared economic vulnerabilities: Report

Tokyo, Aug 9 (IANS) The India-Japan relationship looks like a promising strategic partnership, and the cooperation is being built around de-risking shared economic vulnerabilities, said a report.

According to the report by Tokyo Review, both Japan and India face the harsh realities of weaponised supply chains, energy insecurity, and dependence on China for critical minerals and pharmaceutical ingredients.

It noted that the centre of gravity in the bilateral relationship is ‘unmistakably’ commercial, and those shared vulnerabilities were addressed directly in the recent India-Japan summit, where both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi participated, emphasising three priority areas of cooperation in economic security, energy resilience and technology.

“During the summit, Prime Minister Modi noted that nearly 129 private-sector agreements had been concluded over the past year, opening the way for more than JPY 2 trillion in Japanese investment. Energy security, defence technology co-development, and semiconductor resilience: the priorities announced at the summit all point the same way. Business is at the heart of this relationship; economic security cooperation is what will keep it beating for years to come,” the report added.

It noted that the warmth on display during Takaichi’s visit was hard to miss. It highlighted Prime Minister Narendra Modi introducing Takaichi as his younger sister, saying it’s “a gesture of closeness rarely extended to a foreign head of state.”

The report also countered the interpretation of Japan’s outreach to India as a hedge against an ‘increasingly unpredictable’ US.

The Tokyo Review report called it an oversimplification and said that the Takaichi visit and the current trajectory of India’s relationship with Japan are what the two governments already stated: a “Partnership of Strategic Convergence,” and a bilateral partnership worthy of consideration on its own terms, and not a comparison of Japan-US or India-US relations.

“Judged on its own terms, as an answer to a different and increasingly urgent set of problems, the India-Japan relationship looks like a promising strategic partnership. Japan’s outreach to India is thus better understood as diversification within an alliance framework, rather than preparation of an escape route,” the report emphasised.

–IANS

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