India and Japan on Tuesday finalised an action plan to strengthen security cooperation, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his visiting Japanese counterpart Yukio Hatoyama signing a joint statement here. They also identified nine areas of collaboration and reviewed economic cooperation especially in infrastructure development.
Japan offered to provide bullet train technology to the Indian Railways in its quest to build the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor project from Rewari in Haryana to Vadodara in Gujarat. Both sides decided to work to conclude the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Act at the earliest. Twelve rounds of talks have been held so far.
The joint statement, which came at the end of the annual bilateral summit, expressed satisfaction at the deepening of the annual strategic dialogue between the Foreign Ministers as well as other policy dialogues and the desire to enhance exchanges in the defence field.
Strengthening of collaboration on issues of common strategic interest; setting up of a strategic cooperation mechanism; increase in defence and coast guard cooperation, exchange of information to fight terrorism and other transnational crimes; cooperation at the U.N.; and cooperation on disarmament and non-proliferation were some of the areas earmarked for enhanced collaboration.
Under a new framework, a 2+2 dialogue at Sub Cabinet/Senior Official level was envisaged besides maritime security dialogue.
On the defence front, the action plan visualises regular meetings between the Defence Ministers, annual official-level defence policy dialogue, annual military-to-military talks, regular reciprocal visits of the Service chiefs and ground-to-ground staff talks, Navy-to-Navy staff talks, and developing an annual calendar of defence cooperation and exchanges.
In his statement, Mr. Hatoyama mentioned that the two sides discussed cooperation in defence of sea lanes of communication. India and Japan are among the nations that provide escort to merchant ships off the coast of Somalia to guard against pirate strikes.
The action plan also includes joint exercise and meeting between the Coast Guards of both nations.
Both nations will hold annual bilateral exercise alternately off India and Japan, and if possible hold multi-lateral cooperation too. The Malabar 2007 exercise involves five navies — India, Japan, the United States, Australia and Singapore. The plan also envisages participation as observers in major army and air force exercises and passing exercises during ship visits.
Bedrock of ties
In his opening statement, Dr. Singh said economic partnership between the two countries was the bedrock of the relationship. The two Prime Ministers shared the view that the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project was moving forward from planning to the implementation stage. They also took note of the Memorandum of Understanding on Smart Communities and Eco-friendly Townships between DMIC and JETRO.
Dr. Singh urged Mr. Hatoyama to liberalise the visa regime to promote investment and the latter too made a similar request. Dr. Singh highlighted the move to provide visa on arrival to visitors from Japan.
Both also noted that the Japanese side had set up a consortium of government, academia and industry to establish Indian Institute of Technology at Hyderabad
