India, Japan aim to iron out civil N-deal wrinkles

With India showing willingness to sign the civil nuclear deal with Japan, Tokyo is sending top diplomat Shinsuke Sugiyama to New Delhi next week for last-minute clarifications and negotiations with top officials, including national security advisor Ajit Doval.

Updated on: Aug 19, 2014, 24:55:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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With India showing willingness to sign the civil nuclear deal with Japan, Tokyo is sending top diplomat Shinsuke Sugiyama to New Delhi next week for last-minute clarifications and negotiations with top officials, including national security advisor Ajit Doval.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be on a two-day visit to Japan beginning September 1 before signing the nuclear agreement with Australian PM Tony Abbot on September 4.

India has put the onus of signing the pact on Japan due to extra conditions put forth apparently by foreign minister Fumio Kashida, who belongs to Hiroshima, the site of World War II nuclear holocaust, South Block officials said.

“The Japanese insistence on riders for testing nuclear weapons in a bilateral document despite India unilaterally declaring a moratorium is one of the key irritants.

India is ready to sign the agreement and it is for Japan to sort out its internal issues,” said a senior MEA official. Another issue still hanging fire is the sale with technology transfer of ShinMaywa (US-2) sea-air rescue aircraft.

While foreign ministry mandarins from both sides feel the signing of these two agreements is the keystone of a successful Modi visit, the PM wants to take the relationship to a higher level due to his personal rapport with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe.

“As Japan is Modi’s first big visit, the message will be strategic as both the democracies have shared interests in Asia. The civil nuclear deal and ShinMaywa purchase are still being negotiated from techno-commercial aspects,” said a top official.

Though Japanese ambassador to India Takeshi Yagi has been negotiating with finance secretary Arvind Mayaram on strengthening economic and trade ties, matters have been escalated as potential agreements were being unnecessarily bogged down by red tape on both sides.

It is understood that the Modi-Abe meeting will see a forward movement in maritime security and defence ties.

“There will be movement in bilateral trade and commerce, with both sides identifying the areas of cooperation apart from convergence in strategy and doctrines,” said a South Block official.

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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