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Shinzo Abe visited India four times in 2006, 2014, 2015 and 2017 and had the distinction of being the only Japan PM who graced the Republic Day parade in 2014
Updated:
May 01, 2021 09:13 IST
New Delhi should be confident that Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is willing to accord primacy to bilateral ties
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New Delhi should be confident that Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is willing to accord primacy to bilateral ties
Contrary to the expectations of many, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has turned out to be a true successor of his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, on the foreign policy front. His visit to the United States last month has set the agenda for the wider Indo-Pacific engagement of Tokyo and its evolving priorities.
Focus on China
Right at the outset, it was clear that the crux of the discussions during this first in-person meeting between the newly anointed President of the United States, Joe Biden, and Mr. Suga would revolve around China. To begin with, Tokyo and Washington drilled down to brass tacks on their joint security partnership given the need to address China’s recent belligerence in territorial di
Introduction
In a speech before the Indian Parliament in 2007, then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced the ‘Confluence of Two Seas’, a precursor to Tokyo’s Indo-Pacific policy framework. It referred to the linking of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to make a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’; Abe named India as an anchor in such a vision.
To be sure, India-Japan relations date back to the decades after the Second World War. Their current partnership is increasingly featured as an important pole in Abe’s book,
Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a Beautiful Country: My Vision for Japan) where he writes that it would not surprise him if “in another decade, Japan–India relations overtake Japan–US and Japan–China ties.”