India-Japan Relations @ 70: From Civilisational to Strategic Partnership

The rapidly changing strategic scenarios in Asia have increased Japan’s ties with India over the last few years. Major global and regional geo-political shifts have taken place in the contemporary world, which include the rise of China, the US policy of rebalancing and pivoting to Asia, and the response of regional countries, evolution of a new security architecture in Asia, maritime security challenges in Indian and Pacific Oceans, nuclear tests by North Korea, tensions on account of territorial disputes in South China Sea and East China, the evolution of ASEAN into an ASEAN community. In these contexts, the two Asian democracies have made concerted attempts to intensify their relationship at various levels- economic, strategic and political. Though the two countries had never exhibited much keenness in each other’s priorities, a confluence of various factors such as structural, domestic and individual leadership have given a new push to the bilateral relationship in recent years. The present paper attempts to examine and evaluate the changing dimensions of bilateral relations between the two Asian democracies against the backdrop of the Indo-Pacific region's evolving security and strategic scenarios.