Sunday, 13 Oct, 2024
Shinzo Abe was the best Japanese prime minister India could have wished for
Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was killed while campaigning for elections to Japan’s upper house. A scion of a political family who became Japan's youngest post-war premier, Abe was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead five hours later.
Shinzo Abe’s Japan policy
Abe was a conservative whom political commentators widely described as a right-wing Japanese nationalist. Abe had first become the country’s PM in 2006, but resigned in 2007 due to illness. He got a rare second term in December 2012 and was re-elected in 2014 and 2017. He had resigned in 2020 due to health concerns.
Abe was instrumental in structuring the world's third largest economic through his economic programme that bears his name - "Abenomics". He is widely credited for putting the country in a more robust position to withstand economic shocks like the pandemic than when he came to office almost eight years earlier.
India was placed at the centre of this vision
Abe was no stranger to India. He was three-years-old when he had first visited India with his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, the first Japanese prime minister to visit independent India. During his first visit to India as prime minister in 2007, Abe had addressed the parliament and gave his famous “confluence of the two seas” speech laying the foundation for his concept of Indo-Pacific. This concept has now become mainstream and one of the main pillars of India-Japan ties.
It was during his stint that New Delhi and Tokyo signed the historic civil nuclear agreement, under which Japan will supply nuclear reactors, fuel, and technology to India. India is not a signatory to the non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is the only non-signatory to receive an exemption from Japan. He was also instrumental in rebirth of the QUAD alliance.
During his period, bilateral trade between India and Japan increased from 740 billion yen ($7.023 billion) in 2007 to 1,783 billion yen ($172.8 billion) in 2019 – a rise of 135%. Further, Japanese investment in India grew from 29.8 billion yen ($2.8 billion) in 2005 to 624 billion yen ($45.8 billion) during the same period.
Abe also enjoyed a special rapport with PM Narendra Modi. Apart from visits, the two leaders upgraded India-Japan ties to ‘Special Strategic and Global Partnership’, collaborating on civilian nuclear energy to maritime security, bullet trains to quality infrastructure, Act East policy to Indo-Pacific strategy. More recent illustrations of this cooperation are—the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail, the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC), the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor with twelve industrial townships, the Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor (CBIC) etc.
Japan's growing relationship with India had begun much before Abe, but his term as prime minister not only accelerated the move but also brought New Delhi closer to democracies around the world in making a strategic framework. Abe was the best Japanese prime minister India could have wished for.
