A Ukraine-sized cloud will hang over Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday. However, that may not deflect the high-level meetings from focusing on business and trade.
Not only is Japan India's third biggest trading partner (peaking at Rs 13 lakh crore bilateral trade in 2019), it is also the biggest bilateral donor to India. Both countries also have a decade-long free trade agreement, called CEPA or the 'comprehensive economic partnership agreement'. Japan was the first country Modi visited outside of India's neighbourhood after he became PM in 2014.
Kishida, who took over from Yoshihide Suga as Japan's PM in October, will be the first Japanese leader to visit India in nearly five years, after 'friend of India' Shinzo Abe's prime ministerial visit back in 2017. Abe was supposed to visit India for the annual India-Japan summit in December 2019, but the plan had to be cancelled due to nationwide protests during that time against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Then Covid-19 hit, pushing meetings into the digital realm, and bilateral trade to dive.
Kishida's visit will last barely a day – he is slated to fly to Cambodia on Sunday—but will be significant on two counts. One, obviously, will be on India's stand on the Ukraine war and refusal to act against Russia, which has led to fissures in Quad, Japan's ambitious four-nation anti-China initiative (US and Australia being the other members). The Japan PM is likely to suggest that India shy away from buying Russian oil at a discount as has been suggested by a beleaguered Moscow, and being pushed hard by bureaucrats in New Delhi.
However, the other, and bigger point in the agenda will be the longstanding trade partnership between the two countries – in 2006, the countries re-named their ties, which was till then called 'Strategic and Global Partnership', to 'Special Strategic and Global Partnership', to accentuate the importance of the ties. The ties got a further boost in 2011 when both countries signed CEPA, which was the only trade agreement India had signed in over a decade, until the one with UAE last month.
A review of Japan's big ticket investments in Indian infra projects, including the Rs 1.2 lakh crore bullet train project between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which is largely funded by Japan's International Cooperation Agency, will be held during the meeting. Originally supposed to be inaugurated on August 15, 2022, the project has been direly behind schedule, something Japan is not too pleased about.
Other major projects include the Delhi-Mumbai and Chennai-Bengaluru industrial corridors. A status review of all major projects are likely to be done at the Summit. It is not clear whether Kishida will raise the delicate issue of India getting out of RCEP negotiations – Japan was keen that India remain in this trade deal to balance China, considering that India's allegiance to 'clear-and-present-danger' Russia has now become the bigger elephant in the room.
