MODIS JAPAN VISIT GOOD BEGINING

The Indian Prime Minister’s visit to Japan must be seen for what it is — an opening tour de force in what will be a sustained campaign to bring the two countries closer. One would do well not to miss the forest for the woods in the process As Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan progresses, one can be quite certain of two things. The first is that the big ticket items — the India-Japan nuclear deal, and the purchase of the Japanese US-2 Shin Maywa amphibious planes, probably will not be signed. Presumably this will give way to significant disappointment in India, given that the Press largely jumped the gun and hinted that some of these deals were imminent. However, such disappointment is largely misplaced. This must be seen as a long-term game and stems from two factors: One, The intricate politics and geo-politics that form part of this deal. Two, given that the last Government slept for most of its term, Mr Modi will be compensating for five years of inertia. The India-Japan nuclear deal is perhaps one of the most critical components in India’s bigger gameplan to become self-sufficient in technology and create a web of inter-dependency with Western democracies. While we have been mostly focussed on merely on the India-Japan side of nuclear negotiations, we must take account of the other players that have been lobbying Japan on our behalf — namely Korea and the US. Both Korean and the US designs have significant Japanese component levels in them. Mostly, this relates to the Japanese mastery of metallurgy — specifically the milling of the single- piece reactor vessel. While this seems a simple feat, it is in fact an extraordinarily complex process that had made the US and Korea dependent on Japanese expertise. Without the conclusion of the India-Japan deal, the purchase of Korean and the US reactors are inherently unfeasible. To understand what a game-changer these metallurgical processes developed by Japan can be, one needs to go back to the late 1970s’ sale by Japan to the erstwhile USSR of two steel milling machines. The Japanese were convinced at that point that the sale would be for civilian purposes and would not affect the balance of power. The Americans disagreed and promptly imposed sanctions on the two offending companies Mitsubishi and Hitachi. Sure enough, within the space of two years, Soviet submarines were showing marked improvements in construction techniques, and the resultant quantum increase in their stealth proved a nightmare that took the US several years of hard research to rectify. Clearly, therefore, sharing such dual-use technology as reactor vessel construction is a nightmare the Japanese are loathe to forget. Given the blasé attitude the UPA Government had to foreign policy, Mr Modi will have to make a persuasive case and use all his charm to overcome the latent weariness of the Japanese on this score. Moreover, given that the Korean reactor project in the UAE has run into serious problems and the Obama Administration has been much less proactive than the Bush Administration in supporting the tentative nuclear renaissance in India, Mr Modi is playing with a significantly weaker hand than his predecessor Manmohan Singh was. The story of the US-2 Shin Maywa is no different. It too is a Trojan horse being used as a test case to pry open Japanese defence manufacturing to India. The case here is simple. Japan wishes to sell India the US-2 as a simple civilian plane meant for observation, search and rescue. India, however, wants to turn this into a more complex aircraft capable of maritime reconnaissance and the ability to take defensive or offensive action as the case may be. This required outfitting the plane with military grade electronics and hardpoints for armaments. Clearly this would contradict Japan’s constitutional ban on defence exports. There have, however, been indications that Japan may, at some point, be willing to lift the ban, but to do that, a convincing commercial and geo-political case would have to be made to make it palatable to the Japanese public and the Japanese bureaucracy — which is just as powerful if not more so than India’s babus are. From that point of view, the Shinzo Abe-Modi chemistry, positive statements and the symbolic (but meaningless in practical terms) defence cooperation agreement between the two countries is basically meant to create a crescendo. While it is doubtful that Mr Modi’s visit will mark the apogee of the wave that the Government seeks to create, it will definitely act as a force multiplier in the concerted campaign to coddle the Japanese into authorising defence exports to India. The benefits here are many. Most significant would be the Japanese T-10 tanks and Soryu class submarines — though getting our hands on either of these would require long and sustained engagement and confidence-building with the Japanese. The T-10 is particularly significant because it is quite possibly the only outside tank that fits India’s weight constraints. Weighing in at around 40 tonnes, it is the exception since most other Western tanks weigh in between 56 and 80 tonnes, making them impassable in the soft desert sands of Rajasthan, and equally unwieldy in the heavily-irrigated Punjab sector. Similarly, the Soryu is unique in that it is the biggest and heaviest non-nuclear submarine in existence with commensurate endurance underwater. It is a very good redundancy measure should the nuclear submarine project falter, and in the case of countries like Australia, which refuse to go nuclear, it is seen as the next best thing to a nuclear submarine — uniquely suited to far-flung oceanic deployments. However, it is just as possible that much of the talk one has heard whispered of these two projects is merely day dreaming by defence officials. What cannot be denied though is, how big a victory for India it would be if it succeeds in prying open the Japanese market just a little. On balance, Mr Modi faces a Herculean task on both the big ticket items he was to bring home from Japan. But, far from it being a damp squib, the visit must be seen for what it is — an opening tour de force in what will be a sustained campaign to bring Japan and India closer, and one would do well not to miss the forest for the woods in the process.