India ignores China, holds drills with Japan navy

The battleships of India and Japan will hold regular drills as New Delhi and Tokyo are set to institutionalise exercises between the two navies.

Notwithstanding Beijing’s call to stay away from the US-led bid to contain China, India is now likely to regularise its naval exercises with Japan, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is set to discuss regional security with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe in Tokyo early next week.

“What we have done is to invite Japan to hold exercises in the Indian Ocean and now to institutionalise them because what we were told is that they need to have a fixed programme that they can work on so that they know when we are planning our exercises together,” Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai said, while briefing the media about the prime minister’s ensuing visit to Japan.

India also expressed its “strong reservation” over Beijing’s vow to continue to help Islamabad develop infrastructure in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). “We certainly have made our views known to the Chinese leadership at the highest level. We have serious reservations about this,” Mathai said.

He was reacting to the MoU signed by Beijing and Islamabad during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s recent visit to Pakistan. The MoU envisages a China-Pakistan economic corridor that would pass through the PoK.

New Delhi maintains that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including the PoK, is an integral part of India and any project undertaken by Pakistan–either on its own or with foreign assistance–in the territory under its illegal occupation “has no legal basis and is completely unacceptable.”

Singh is set to visit Tokyo at a time when China’s territorial disputes with both Japan and India have come to the fore. He will hold the annual summit with Abe, who took a hard-line stand on Tokyo’s row with Beijing over the islands known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

New Delhi’s move to step up its defence ties with US-ally Japan too comes close on the heels of Li’s visit to India and Pakistan. The Chinese premier had said in New Delhi last Tuesday that a distant relation might not be as useful as a near neighbour.

He apparently made the remark to send out a tacit message to India to keep off the US policy of rebalancing towards Asia, a move Beijing perceives to be aimed at containing China. The first bilateral exercise between the Indian Navy and the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force–JIMEX 12–was held in June 2012 off the coast of Tokyo. The next edition of the exercise is likely to be held in the Indian Ocean later this year, marking commencement of regular drills.

India had in 2007 joined the US, Australia, Japan and Singapore for the “Malabar” naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal. The five-nation drill had purportedly rattled China, which had earlier that year issued strong demarches to New Delhi, Washington, Canberra and Tokyo seeking to know details of the quadrilateral initiative.

Revealing that New Delhi, Washington and Tokyo had recently explored possibilities of a trilateral naval exercise, the foreign secretary said it had not worked out, although India and Japan were set to go ahead with the bilateral drills.