EAM Jaishankar discusses India-Japan ties, tourism growth, and challenges with China

At the India-Japan Forum Inaugural Session Conversation, EAM S Jaishankar said, “We’ve never had problems between India and Japan but not having problems doesn’t mean everything works well… I would say how do you take good sentiment and make it into a practical plan.”

He further mentioned the growing trend of Indian tourists, stating, “When I look today at the kind of spike in Indian tourists… our passport issuer is going up actually at the rate of almost 10 to 15 per cent a year. We are issuing between about 13 million to 15 million passports every year and these are 10-year validities. In this country, foreign travel is growing and interest in foreign tourism is growing but we haven’t yet seen any of this directed at Japan. If you look at Southeast Asia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Gulf, Europe, Indian tourists are really going there in very large numbers.”

EAM Jaishankar also reflected on the shared experiences of India and Japan in terms of their proximity to China, noting, “In a way, India and Japan do share the attribute of both being neighbours of China… In our particular case, we had a stable relationship with China. It was growing in many respects, in terms of trade, it was very, very substantial and still is very substantial. There had been a certain amount of investment, mostly from China to India. There were some issues we have which is a very imbalanced trade. We have had a lot of market access issues in China.”

The Minister went on to elaborate on the impact of the recent tensions with China, particularly after the border clashes in 2020. He explained, “Our entire relationship with China was predicated on the fact that the border areas would remain peaceful and stable and we had agreements to ensure that. In 2020, the Chinese chose to bring a lot of forces to the border areas and obviously we responded with counter-deployments. Then we had an incident in which a number of soldiers got killed and obviously this impacted the relationship. So it has taken us 4.5 years to negotiate the disengagement of forces, which is really the fact that the militaries are too close at some places along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).”

Jaishankar concluded by emphasising the ongoing challenges in de-escalating the situation with China, stating, “We still have challenges left with us. We still have to de-escalate because what we have done is disengage forces from close proximity but we have a de-escalation because there’s still a very large number of forces… Now, we have to sit down and discuss with China how we rebuild our relationship and that is an exercise that still has to be undertaken.”