External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar during the Raisina Roundtable, in Tokyo, Japan on March 7, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI
India and Japan are natural partners in a world headed towards “re-globalisation”, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on March 7, asserting that the two nations also share basic affinities, being democracies and market economies.
Mr. Jaishankar is in Tokyo for the second leg of his four-day visit to South Korea and Japan.
Addressing the first Raisina Roundtable in Tokyo, the Minister said, “The world is heading for re-globalisation with the building of resilient and reliable supply chains and trusted and transparent digital transactions.”
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The Minister said the “top 20 or 30 nations today are not what they were two decades ago. Even less so. What they were four or eight decades ago.”
“Not only are the countries that impact us different but so are relative weight, importance and capability. As a result, new balances are being sought and occasionally achieved,” he said.
Mr. Jaishankar asserted that India and Japan are natural partners in the re-globalisation of the world as democracies and market economies, they share basic affinities, too.
He also said that India and Japan’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific is being taken forward by the Quad each year. “The value of this contribution is also being increasingly appreciated across the world,” he said.
The QUAD is a four-member strategic security dialogue between the U.S., Australia, India and Japan.
Underlining that the comfort India and Japan have built up is a foundation to think more ambitiously as the two nations look at the opportunities and challenges of the future, he said, “The progress in India in the last decade promises even more for a partnership.”
The Raisina Roundtable is a key step towards enhancing track two exchanges between India and Japan, the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi said in a statement ahead of Mr. Jaishankar’s visit.
Mr. Jaishankar’s visit and meetings in Tokyo will provide strategic guidance to India’s functional cooperation in various areas, impart further momentum to bilateral exchanges, and set the agenda for future cooperation, it said.