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
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”
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