:: Inder Malhotra

India, Japan get close, China feels the heat

By Inder Malhotra

Nothing could have underscored both the importance and the complexities of relations within Asia's Power Triangle than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's bilateral visit to Japan and subsequent sojourn in China primarily for the multilateral Asia-Europe Summit, inevitably dominated by the global economic meltdown. The two visits also demonstrated India's need to carefully calibrate its relationship with the other two Asian giants. Sensitivities have to be tackled skilfully.

Time was, all through the Cold War, when Japan hardly figured in India's geo-strategic calculations because it was looked upon as an economic superpower but a political pigmy in a tight security embrace of the United States. To Tokyo, New Delhi was "too close to the Soviet Union". A billion dollars worth of yen credit a year was, however, welcome. Things changed materially, if slowly, after the end of the Cold War and disintegration of the Soviet Union. During the first decade of the current millennium, a state was reached when the world order, such as it is, could be said to be reasonably stable. In the words of the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, "for the first time since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the prospect of war is becoming even more unthinkable (than before). Major powers are competing in peace and not preparing for war".

Consequently, the six powers propping the international order to some degree or the other - the US, the European Union, Russia, China, Japan and India - are all operating in their relationship with one another on the basis of a paradoxical combination of competition and cooperation, even where a clear clash of interests and objectives is involved. This is true as much of political, strategic and military relations as of those in the all-important economic sphere.

It is in this context that India and Japan signed a "declaration on security cooperation", stating that their "partnership would be an essential pillar of the future architecture of the region". India has concluded quite a few such agreements with various countries. In the case of Japan, the declaration signed with India is only the third such document, the earlier two having been concluded with the US and Australia, the two countries with which Japan has had very intimate security relationship. India's importance in Japanese eyes is high because the maritime interests of the two nations converge. Japan's overwhelming dependence on oil to be imported from the Gulf, to say nothing of its other maritime trade, makes the safety of sea lanes vital to it. The largest navy in the Indian Ocean is American; India's is the second largest. Moreover, this country has a pivotal position in this ocean. For its part, Japan can be a source of the state-of-art maritime technology to India. Yet, as keen observers of the Asia-Pacific scene have noted, India has scrupulously avoided any reference in the text of the India-Japan declaration to the "new security challenges and threats", a phrase that forms part of Japan's agreement with Australia and is a "code expression" for the rise in China's might.

That is not all. Within hours of signing the security declaration, Dr Manmohan Singh told an elite gathering in Tokyo that the increase in India's bilateral trade with China in the last year alone was "more than the whole of total trade with Japan." This was obviously an attempt to reassure China. For, later the Prime Minister declared that economic relations and security cooperation with Japan "would not be at the cost of any third country, least of all China". It would be naive, however, to believe that the Chinese have been reassured. Such pro forma statements have been made at different times in different contexts, including at the time in 1954 when the US signed a military pact with Pakistan, without being taken too seriously.

Only one Indian TV news channel reported - and no else did - that the Chinese were miffed by the Indo-Japanese security declaration, and had indicated to some of the foreign dignitaries assembled in Beijing that China was opposed to giving India a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. If this did actually happen, the Chinese were only admitting what they had actually done when the issue was last discussed at the UN some years ago. Acting subtly and behind the scene they got the move scuttled. Sadly, the Americans gave them tacit support. At last August's meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group at Vienna also China, at the last minute, tried to obstruct the NSG waiver to the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal. This was contradictory to the assurances Chinese leaders had been giving their Indian opposite numbers privately though they never articulated these publicly. So much so that during the stalemate at Vienna, Chinese president Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao refused to take the calls of the Indian Prime Minister. Only after President George W. Bush telephoned Mr Hu did Beijing let the waiver go through.

Because of the qualitative change in the Indo-US relations and continuing improvement in them, the Chinese are apprehensive that India might join the US-sponsored and Japan-supported idea of a quadrangular "concert of democracies" consisting of India, Japan, Australia and the US. For this reason they protested when these four countries held joint naval exercises in August last year. But Beijing should relax. Since then the new, Sinophile Prime Minister of Australia has put paid to the idea. More importantly, India has made it clear that the security cooperation with Japan is purely bilateral and there is no intention to give it a trilateral, leave alone, quadrilateral shape.

In view of all this, time has come when this country should give expression to its concerns about Chinese actions impinging on Indian security as forthrightly as the Chinese do in relation to their concerns. The most important in this connection is China's prolonged nuclear and missiles aid to Pakistan and arms supplies of all kinds. Once Beijing even tried to violate Russia's intellectual property rights by attempting to transfer to Pakistan, technology for the production of JF-17 warplanes it had imported from Moscow for its exclusive use. Nor has the Indian government said anything about the construction of the Gwadar port on Pakistan's Makran coast at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.