Modi-Kishida summit this week, Ukraine and Indo-Pacific on agenda

The March 19-20 summit called at the behest of Japan is basically a continuation of the cancelled 2019 Modi-Abe summit in Guwahati due to orchestrated CAA protests

Updated on: Mar 15, 2022, 09:14:53 IST

By Shishir Gupta, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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Japan and India are expected to cement economic cooperation and share assessments on the crisis in Ukraine and Indo-Pacific during Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to India this Saturday. The Japanese PM arrives on an official visit on March 19 afternoon and leaves the next day for Cambodia.

File photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting then Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida in Japan in 2014.

Kishida’s visit is a continuation of the cancelled physical summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Guwahati on December 15-17 due to orchestrated protests in Assam due to Citizenship Amendment Act. An early date for the Modi-Kishida meeting was sought by the Japanese side despite global turmoil due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Also Read| India pushes for dialogue as Quad takes up Ukraine war

While PM Modi is expected to exchange notes with PM Kishida on the ongoing crisis with India calling for the cessation of violence, the main topic of discussion will be the Indo-Pacific with a belligerent China threatening anyone who provides military support to Taiwan, participating in joint air exercises with the Russian air force in the Sea of Japan and sending warships into territorial waters of Philippines in the Sulu Sea.

Although Japan has increased conventional deterrence in wake of Chinese belligerence in the Indo-Pacific, PM Kishida is totally opposed to Japan acquiring nuclear weapons or shedding its pacifist doctrine as he represents the city of Hiroshima in the Japanese House of Representatives. Hiroshima was bombed by the US using a nuclear device on August 6, 1945, in the final year of World War II. Japan, in the meantime, has increased defence cooperation with both the Philippines and Australia.

During his New Delhi visit, PM Kishida is expected to address a business event even as the two close allies will discuss the possibility of expanding the bullet train project beyond the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor. The two leaders will also exchange notes on building resilient supply chains between partner countries so that they are not impacted by vagaries of global politics and dependency on any adversarial country.

Also Read| Officials involved in bullet train project to take course in Japanese

The two leaders will also discuss the upcoming QUAD summit in Tokyo after the Australian general elections in May 2022 with the Chinese routinely taking potshots at the security grouping by calling its Asian NATO against Beijing and a Cold war instrument. This was dismissed as a lazy analogy by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar at the Munich Security Conference last month.

While Chinese military activity in East Ladakh and around the Japanese Senkaku Islands will be shared at the summit, the two leaders will also discuss the situation in the Af-Pak region with the Taliban in control of Kabul and the so-called Islamic State raising its head against Shia Muslim community in Pakistan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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