The three-day visit by Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, last weekend will have consequences for India which go far beyond relations between the two countries. A $12 billion "Japan-India Make-in-India Special Finance Facility" was the biggest surprise of the visit: it was almost like the nuclear deal surprise in 2005, which the George W. Bush administration sprang on Manmohan Singh when the Indian side was only expecting an upgraded "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership" between Washington and New Delhi.
The Make-in-India Facility is a vote of confidence in this country by a major industrial power at a time when India's economic indicators are being interpreted as below the expectations generated when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government came into office in May last year. Just as the Indo-US nuclear deal ended India's long nuclear winter, Japan's bold decision to commit $12 billion towards promoting multi-layered bilateral economic cooperation could become a catalyst for the expansion of manufacturing in India.
The Nippon Export and Investment Insurance and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation delved deep into decades of Japanese corporate experience in India to come up with a scheme that will enhance the hitherto unrealized potential of marrying Japanese expertise with the vast market opportunities offered by India. The new facility is thus designed to "promote direct investment of Japanese companies and trade from Japan to India, to support their business activities with counterparts in India, including development of necessary infrastructure, and to help materialize [the] Make-in-India policy" of the Narendra Modi government.
Abe did not hesitate to make it plain that the success of this facility is contingent on "further enhancement of reform measures including in the financial sector." But Japan's firm commitment to deepen cooperation on Make-in-India, reflected in the formal denomination of a fund with the nomenclature of Make-in-India Facility, is the biggest shot in the arm so far for that policy since it was announced last year. That realization prompted the biggest turnout of ministers in the National Democratic Alliance government and others at a lunch hosted by Modi for Abe at the national capital's Hyderabad House, a turnout which was not witnessed at a working lunch for the US president, Barack Obama, during Republic Day week this year.
The overall outcome of Abe's visit will set at rest doubts that have been expressed about Tokyo's stakes in India: doubts caused by ambiguities when Modi travelled to Japan last year soon after becoming prime minister. For instance, a plan for Japanese investment of $35 billion was aspirational. It was a goal and no projects were identified. Aides to both Modi and Abe subsequently realized that adequate preparations had not gone into the meeting of the two leaders then. So they strenuously set about overcoming that lacuna before the second Modi-Abe summit last weekend.
It has not been noticed in the din of the divisive domestic politics in India that Modi and Abe met four times between their first summit last year and now, when they meticulously went over the preparations for last week's outcomes. The two prime ministers sat down on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly in New York in September, met again at the Group of Twenty summit in Antalya, scrutinized the plans for Abe's visit over lunch in Kuala Lumpur on the margins of the East Asia summit and finally at a half-hour meeting in Paris most recently at the climate conclave.
There was recognition at these four high-level reviews that bold decisions were needed to dispel an air of hesitancy in the bilateral engagement. The bullet train project between Ahmedabad and Mumbai is a typical example. The sticking points in the deal had been ironed out long ago and decks were cleared for its agreement. Yet no one in the government was willing to take decisions that would produce a contract. Modi tasked the Niti Aayog vice-chairman, Arvind Panagariya, to clear the cobwebs. Pre-summit preparations, approved by the two leaders at their four meetings, then led to a breakthrough.
The memorandum of understanding on nuclear energy, popularly known as the nuclear deal with Japan, has been on the drawing board for over seven years. It would still not have come about if India's foreign secretary, S. Jaishankar, had not gone back in time and donned the cap he wore at the time of the Indo-US nuclear deal. He was then joint secretary in the ministry of external affairs in charge of the Americas. Drawing on that experience as a key negotiator with the US on the deal, Jaishankar was able to convince the doubting Japanese how the MoU they were signing would actually promote peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Japan had never done such a deal before with any country. Jaishankar's experience with the US deal helped overcome their timidity in nuclear cooperation as the foreign secretary travelled to Tokyo twice before Abe's visit and his Japanese interlocutors made one return trip.
India broke its long-standing protocol of not lending high-level official presence at any visit-related event until delegation-level talks when Modi decided to attend the India-Japan Business Leaders Forum first thing on Saturday morning. Japanese businessmen who knew from previous experience in India that the prime minister may not attend were delighted. The change signals primacy for business over bureaucracy in the Modi government's architecture.
Such changes ease interaction with Japan partly because Abe is a politician who is different from the stereotypical Japanese prime ministers - just as Modi is too. This was obvious when Abe said in the Central Hall of Parliament in 2007 that "Japan has undergone 'The Discovery of India' by which I mean we have discovered India as a partner..." On his latest visit, Abe will be remembered for his pithy remark that Modi is like a bullet train, his economic policies "safe and reliable like Shinkansen-high speed trains."
Three days after one of the most successful visits by any Japanese prime minister to India, it is tempting to think that Jawaharlal Nehru was prophetic about Indo-Japanese friendship in 1949. In a letter addressed to Tokyo's children, who were valiantly coping with the unsparing aftermath of World War II, Nehru wrote: "I hope that when the children of India and the children of Japan will grow up, they will serve not only their great countries, but also the cause of peace and cooperation all over Asia and the world."
Nehru's missive was occasioned by letters to him from 815 children in Tokyo - 1,500 according to unofficial accounts - who had never seen an elephant after animals in Japan's premier zoo, the Ueno, died during the World War. The children requested Nehru to send an elephant for them. The man who acquired the honorific of chacha among children, dutifully obliged. In 1949, Ueno zoo got a gift of an elephant from the children of India through their first prime minister's efforts.
Nehru did not count Abe personally among these children when he wrote his reply to Tokyo's boys and girls. Nehru, of course, knew of Abe as an infant because his maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was the first Japanese prime minister to visit India in 1957 when Nehru was striding the global stage and punching above India's weight in post-World War conditions. Little Abe did not count in Nehru's vision because his letter was written before the present prime minister was born to Kishi's daughter, Yoko, and Shintaro Abe only in 1954. As far as the weekend visitor's political pedigree goes, Shintaro Abe was Japan's foreign minister in 1980s and left his strong imprint on Japanese diplomacy: Shintaro's father, Kan Abe, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1937 and 1942. The story of Kan Abe, in itself, offers fascinating material for a full column.
But the post-World War II generation of Japanese people constituted the focus of Nehru's hopes when he addressed his letter to Tokyo's children. Shinzo Abe represents them. Just as Narendra Modi's generation represents their Indian counterpart for the kind of bilateral engagement that the first prime minister envisioned. Modi is the country's only post-colonial prime minister, born in 1950 and, therefore, he embodies Nehru's calculations in terms of the hopes expressed 66 years ago for "the children of India and the children of Japan." What Shinzo Abe together with Modi unveiled last weekend significantly advanced what Nehru foresaw and hoped for.
