Fumio Kishida’s India visit aims to boost ties, but Japan’s acid test lies in shielding G20 from anti-Russia G7 agenda

By: Gurjit Singh

It is hoped that Fumio Kishida’s visit will help to harmonize the G7 and G20 positions and not sway towards the G7 position alone

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will be visiting India on 20 March almost exactly a year after his first visit to India as prime minister in 2022. He has been quite meticulous in maintaining the annual summit engagement with India though it is not strictly following a bilateral rotation. Following Kishida’s visit in March 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Japan for the Quad Summit in May 2022, when he also met Kishida. Subsequently, Modi also visited Japan in September 2022 for the state funeral of former prime minister Shinzo Abe.

The visit of Kishida this month will also be in the nature of consultation between the G20 chair India and the G7 chair Japan.

This will help to harmonise their positions and possibly have the G7 play a more constructive role in ensuring that the G20 can meet its stated goals and not get derailed over Ukraine. In this context, there was a hiccup when the Japanese foreign minister did not attend the G20 foreign ministers meeting on 1 -2 March instead sending his junior minister as he was busy with a parliamentary session. The next day he turned up to attend the Quad foreign ministers meeting giving the perhaps unintended perception that while the Quad was important to Japan, the G20 perhaps was less so. That was followed by a quick announcement about the visit of Kishida to close such apprehensions.

Of course, the apprehensions will truly be allayed once the results of the Kishida visit emerge.

While India and Japan are on a strong wicket bilaterally, they need to do more regionally and internationally on which their approaches are now slightly at variance. India and Japan are both members of Quad and hence committed to a free and open Indo-Pacific, strategically, economically and functionally.

The Quad was also discussed this month when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made his maiden visit to India.

India remains keen that the Ukraine issue on which Australia and Japan follow the United States closely and on which India keeps its strategic autonomy, should not become disruptive of the G20 or the Quad. The insistence of the G7 countries, which include Japan on including strong condemnation of Russia in the G20 communique is preventing a joint communique from emerging. Meanwhile, for the first time, the Quad foreign ministers joint statement included references to Ukraine, which is not a direct concern of the Quad or the Indo-Pacific but the approach followed by Japan and Australia to follow the US is blurring these lines between the challenges of the Indo-Pacific and the challenges of NATO.

It is hoped that Kishida’s visit will help to harmonise the G7 and G20 positions and not sway towards the G7 position alone. Kishida is expected to invite Prime Minister Modi to the Hiroshima G7 summit.

There are other Quad commitments on which progress needs to be pursued. What exactly happened to the vaccine initiative to be funded by Japan? Similarly, the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative (SCRI) announced with great fanfare two years ago between Japan, India and Australia has also been muted over the last year. Japan had committed to having more dialogue and promoting efforts towards resilient supply chains including enhancing manufacturing capacity in India to become part of wider supply chains. To this end, Japan has funded two Japanese companies in their efforts to expand manufacturing in India without necessarily calling it a China-plus-one initiative.

During the visit, one can look forward to a possible resurrection of the SCRI which becomes all the more important because in 2022 all the Quad countries have actually increased their trade with China instead of diminishing it.

India has successfully used its period as G20 chair to articulate the voice of the Global South. The virtual summit which India held with 125 countries of the Global South in January, brought forward key priorities and emphasised that they should not be brushed away. Despite the crisis in Ukraine India has continued to work with G20 to see how these priorities could be expressed and brought into play. Japan has always been interested in the developing world and in principle wants to work with India, like the enunciation of the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, now subsumed within the FoIP. However, Japan has let trilateral cooperation with India in the Indo-Pacific and in Africa remain sporadic. Other G7 countries like Germany, France and the UK have already started work with India on projects in Africa, Latin America and the Indo-Pacific.

With Japan, this has largely been left to the private sector. It has no institutionalised responsibility given to any particular institution. In the Japanese way, unless there is institutional support, such initiatives do not go forward. Japan’s own TICAD 8 with Africa, held in Tunisia in 2022, was not a roaring success. Kishida himself could not make it due to COVID. India and Japan could do well to collaborate more in Africa. At the same time, Japan could do more with India, to work trilaterally in the ASEAN countries and in other parts of the Indo-Pacific. Here, the communique with Australia sounds more promising, than with Japan.

The importance of continued Indo-Japanese collaboration through the Act East forum for the sustainable economic development of India’s northeastern states and for enhancing their connectivity with Southeast Asia remains an important objective. The launch of the Japan-India initiative for sustainable development of the northeastern region of India included an initiative for the bamboo value chain in the northeast and cooperation in health care, forest resources management, connectivity and tourism in various states of the northeast of India. This requires more deliberate impetus, as this will not only develop the northeastern states of India but also increase connectivity to Myanmar, which is currently a problem area for ASEAN, on which India and Japan could do better to coordinate their positions, which are not in tandem.

The India-Japan special strategic and global partnership now needs to have more people-to-people exchanges, tourism and concerted economic activity. India’s trade with Japan has certainly increased, but the review of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement which India has been seeking has not made much headway. Japan achieved its target last year of investing in India, about yen 3.5 trillion and continues its efforts to attain the target of yen 5 trillion (about $42 billion ). While India benefits from Japanese FDI it is important to convert this into value chains, particularly resilient value chains.

At the same time, Japan’s consistent support to India for development through its ODA is a very important part of the India-Japan narrative. The mega project of the high-speed railway between Ahmedabad and Mumbai is now going ahead better than before. Japan is also helping the construction of six metros in different metropolitan cities. Augmentation of ODA and a greater diversity of projects will help also to diversify Japanese business interests in India.

While this visit is good for coordination purposes, it also has the potential of diversifying and deepening the India-Japan strategic partnership in all aspects and truly making the relationship special. The current state of the world demands that India and Japan use this opportunity to raise the bar on the opportunities afforded and make the relationship truly special. Using the goodwill of the bilateral engagement they must enhance their coordination on the Quad, on the G20 and globally because reformed multilateralism should also benefit from the India-Japan bilateral success.

The author is a former ambassador to Germany, Indonesia, Ethiopia ASEAN and the African Union. He tweets @AmbGurjitSingh. Views expressed are personal.