Fumio Kishida’s India visit: Personal invite to Narendra Modi for G7 Summit in Hiroshima boosts India’s global stature

By: Gurjit Singh

Although the current visit was not classified as the annual summit since it was the turn of the Prime Minister of India to visit Japan, the significance of the visit rest in the fact that Fumio Kishida took the trouble to invite Narendra Modi for G7 Summit in Hiroshima in person

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan paid a visit to Delhi on 19 and 20 March, 2023. This is likely to be the first among several meetings that he will have with Prime Minister Narendra Modi this year. Following this visit, the leaders are expected to meet on the margins of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, the Quad summit in Sydney and Prime Minister Kishida is expected back in India for the G20 Summit in September. Perhaps due to this plethora of meetings and the busy calendar, the current visit was not classified as the annual summit since it was the turn of the Prime Minister of India to visit Japan. There was no joint statement or major bilateral agreement during the visit.

The significance of the Kishida visit, therefore, is that he took the trouble, after having visited most of the G7 countries to come and personally invite Prime Minister Modi to the G7 summit in his hometown of Hiroshima. He also used the occasion to enhance the regional profile of the India-Japan relationship by announcing his renewed Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) policy at the Sapru House lecture on 20 March.

The visit can be seen as a progression of India’s strategic partnership working on regional and global levels and discussing matters which impact the world.

Within the G7-G20 coordination, there is a large amount of commonality. Kishida is interested in the Global South and sees Indian efforts to prioritize the agenda of the Global South under its G20 presidency, as valuable for Japan’s chairmanship of the G7. Kishida had discussed the Global South in his meeting with President Joe Biden in Washington earlier this year. This is something that the G7 and G20 can coordinate better. So far, the G7 has had a record of many announcements, but with low fulfilment.

Where the FOIP is concerned, it was essentially bringing together many concepts and ideas which already exist in various enunciations including Kishida’s own address to the Shangri La dialogue in 2022. What has changed since then, is the Ukraine crisis and the heating up of the Taiwan crisis. The revised FoIP has all the principles dealing with maritime security, international rules-based order, maintenance of international peace and security and protection of territorial integrity and sovereignty, besides all the functional issues, which the Quad has also been discussing.

However, Kishida has added the Ukraine crisis and condemnation of Russia to the FoIP. Several people believe that the Indo-Pacific is not an arena where the Ukraine crisis should be discussed. Japan perhaps believes that China, which is not directly mentioned in the FoIP, (though Russia is) will act in Taiwan, which would impact the Indo-Pacific negatively.

Japan believes that warning the Indo-Pacific about the Ukraine crisis is essential. From the Indian point of view, perhaps this is overplaying its hand. This issue also remains discordant between the G7 and the G20. Japan along with Australia and the US introduced Ukraine into the Quad document for the first time when the foreign ministers met earlier in March. The Ukraine issue thus is not going away and Japan prefers its G7 adherence to this than contribute to making a compromise to make the G20 succeed. This has to be noted even though otherwise Kishida was clear that they had a stake in ensuring the success of India’s presidency of the G20.

There are two interesting aspects of the FoIP. First is the announcement that Japan would bring about $75 billion into the Indo-Pacific to develop its infrastructure and its functional enhancements. At present, India obtains about $2 billion per annum as FDI from Japan and $4 billion per annum as ODA. This $6 billion per annum figure would need to be increased to at least $8 billion if the bilateral target of $40 billion of Japanese exposure to India is to be met. Most of it should be new FDI.

The new commitment of $75 billion to expand economic engagement with the region provides avenues for attracting more investment from Japan to augment the steady flow of ODA. Even though there were no new big ODA announcements on this occasion, the fourth tranche of the Ahmedabad-Mumbai high-speed railway for Yen 300 billion was announced. There are enough structural aspects of cooperation going on between India and Japan to facilitate more FDI.

However, neither trilateral cooperation nor the supply chain resilience initiative started two years ago between India, Japan and Australia were mentioned during the visit, either during the speech or during the discussions as elaborated. There seems to be a lag on the part of Japan in pushing ahead on some of these issues which were earlier discussed.

Secondly, another important area has been the development of the India-Japan Northeast Forum. It has sought to develop Northeast India though slowly. The idea was to link it with the trilateral highway with Myanmar and Thailand and the Kaladan multimodal project which will run through Myanmar. Given the problems in Myanmar and the low probability that this integration process will work, there is a new idea that the Bay of Bengal area should be better integrated using the northeast of India and Bangladesh as the core. This is a welcome new idea and serves India-Bangladesh, India-Japan and the importance of the North East all equally well.

There is awareness of Japan’s rising defence expenditure and its interest in expanding its own defence production. India remains keen to be a part of that process and lower the costs by offering competitive manufacturing facilities for Indo-Japanese technology and joint ventures. More important than that is the possibility of a resilient supply chain for critical minerals and semiconductors.

While an announcement has not ensued, this matter has been discussed and Japan needs to focus on this so that the value of the Quad in developing these alternate supply chains, which are not dependent only on China, or a single country, could be pursued.

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