OPINION:
For the dreamers in Foggy Bottom, always on the scout for match-making, Japan and India have seemed natural candidates for a romance. Japan’s highly industrialized economy needs markets and raw materials, and a slowly industrializing India has the resources in abundance.
Matching the two nations would reinforce an alliance, first political and perhaps eventually military as well, between Asia’s two largest democracies. After the 1949 collapse of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government in China, a Japanese-Indian alliance was envisioned as something to halt Communist expansion in Asia.
Washington’s planners included India in their enormous economic aid programs for South Korea, Taiwan and South Vietnam in the 1950s and ’60s, and a special fund for regional collaboration, essentially for Japan and India, was extended year after year but produced only development of an iron ore deposit, a railroad and a port city intended to replace Calcutta as India’s major commercial center.
When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited India earlier this month it appeared that after all the dreaming in Washington the two countries were, on their own, settling into a cooperative arrangement for development. The growing specter of Chinese economic as well as military expansion has seized attention in both Tokyo and New Delhi. A $15 billion, low-interest Japanese loan will finance a favorite project of Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi, a fast railway from Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, to Ahmedabad, capital of Mr. Modi’s native state of Gujerat, and eventually to New Delhi.
Mr. Modi, trying to liberate India from a half-century of state capitalism, is using Japanese assistance to expand India’s weak infrastructure, which most economists see as a barrier to the economic take-off that transformed China. India has in theory the capacity to repeat China’s “miracle” and to surpass it, with its enormous natural resources and one of the world’s youngest populations. Putting Japan into the Indian economic picture could be the way to defeat the enormous and enormously powerful government bureaucracy in New Delhi, and the fear of foreign investment. The ribbon clerks whom politicians have relied on in post-British India are one of the most difficult obstacles to genuine progress.
No two countries have larger cultural differences to overcome than Japan and India, the Japanese with their manic satisfaction with extending negotiations, and the Indians for their appetite for talk for talk’s sake.
A shadow hangs over Mr. Modi’s politics. His party’s origins in Hindu chauvinism are especially dangerous at a time when radical Islam is attempting to infiltrate India’s large Muslim population. India’s 180 million Muslims are the world’s third-largest Islamic community, much of it mired in poverty and ignorance. India’s blood links to the political disorder in neighboring Muslim Pakistan, carved out of British India, make such a threat very real.
The new Japan-India ties are welcome in Asia, where the Obama administration’s famous “pivot to Asia” never happened, and China’s aggressive behavior is visible all about. Sometimes the news of the world is not all bad.
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