New commonality

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan has come and gone. Compared to the visit by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China a few days earlier, it was a low-key affair. At the heart of the relationship lies a mundane detail: politically the two countries don't have much in common, in either positive or negative terms, and relations even went into deep freeze after 1998.

India has also tended to see Japan as following a foreign policy that is dovetailed into US foreign policy. For Japan, that may be a consequence of history and circumstance. For India, it has been an irritant. That irritation reached its peak after Pokhran II, when Japan imposed sanctions on India.

Since 2001, however, relations have improved""in large part because the US decided to improve its relations with India. Today, to the extent possible, India also tries to ensure that its foreign policy does not offend the US, while it shares with Japan the common goal of restructuring the United Nations and securing seats on the high table in the Security Council. This has created the ground for India and Japan to come closer.

Also, both have the same potential Asian hegemon on their borders""China. If India and Japan collaborate more than hitherto, there can be only one objective: keep China from declaring, even if unofficially, a variant of the Monroe Doctrine. That doctrine laid down, way back in 1823, that the area beyond the halfway mark in the Atlantic was the American sphere of influence, so Europeans keep out.

Substitute America for Europe and the congruence of Indian, Japanese and US interests becomes evident. All in all, therefore, we can look forward to some changes in Indo-Japan relations in the coming years. This is the main significance of the Koizumi visit. It will not be lost on China.

But political relationships need more than a common political problem to sustain them. After all, China can always exploit to its advantage the pursuit by India and Japan of permanent Security Council seats.

History shows that political relationships that stand on two legs ""one political/strategic and the other economic""fare better. So India and Japan need to integrate their economies more. More trade and more investment are obvious solutions but in order to make that happen, both economies need to be growing.

Until the 1990s, when the Japanese economy was growing rapidly, India's was not. Now it is the other way round. Also, Japan for logistical reasons has already been integrating with China, which is now its largest partner.

India has moved in that direction as well, with China displacing Japan in terms of trade. The realised cumulative inflow of investment from Japan has been less than $2 billion and has come from about Japanese 300 companies.

Japanese aid is now being ramped up, and the prospect of a dedicated high-speed rail corridor on the heavy traffic routes is to be welcomed. Clearly, there is only one way to go for both the political and economic relationships""up, provided distractions do not interfere. Nehru had gifted an elephant to Japan once. A hare would have been better.