Asia | Asian geopolitics

Fear of China is pushing India and Japan into each other’s arms

Asia’s biggest and richest democracies are close. They could be much closer

This handout photograph taken on March 20, 2023 and released by the Indian Press Information Bureau (PIB) shows Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (L) listening to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi during their visit at the Buddha Jayanti Park in New Delhi. - Kishida on March 20 called India vital to ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific after talks with his counterpart touching on shared concerns about China. (Photo by PIB / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO/Indian Press Information Bureau (PIB)" - NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS (Photo by -/PIB/AFP via Getty Images)
Image: Getty Images
|DELHI and TOKYO

THE MUGHAL PRINCE Dara Shikoh was beheaded in 1659 after publishing a scandalous book, “The Confluence of the Two Seas”, in which he identified a spiritual affinity between Hinduism and Islam. In 2007 Abe Shinzo, then Japan’s prime minister, borrowed the book’s title for a stirring speech to India’s parliament in which he called for the Indian and Pacific oceans to be seen as one strategic space, and for Japan and India to recognise their shared interests. Those ideas, the basis for taking an expansive Indo-Pacific view of Asian security, are now widely accepted among Western strategists. “Without the Japan-India relationship, there is no Indo-Pacific,” says Kenneth Juster, America’s ambassador to India from 2017 to 2021.  “That relationship is vital to why we have this concept, and to the future of the region.”

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Under a bodhi tree”

From the March 25th 2023 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Tsubasa Ito teaches his son Koya how to play baseball in Nagoya City, Japan

Fathers are doing more child care in East Asia

About time, too

A Saiga antelope walks on a prairie outside Almaty, Kazakhstan

Ice Age antelopes surge back from the brink of extinction

Even better, these peers of sabre-toothed tigers can help with carbon capture


An illustration of a man in a suit (Prabowo Subianto) with four speech bubbles of barying sizes that read: "SIR!".

Indonesia’s Prabowo is desperate to impress Trump and Xi

The new president’s first foreign tour was a shambles


Is India’s education system the root of its problems?

A recent comparison with China suggests that may be so

Meet the outspoken maverick who could lead India

Nitin Gadkari, India’s highways minister, talks to The Economist

The Adani scandal takes the shine off Modi’s electoral success

The tycoon’s indictment clouds the prime minister’s prospects