Japan foreign minister to visit India for strategic dialogue

New Delhi: Japan’s foreign minister Toshimitsu Motegi will arrive in India on Thursday for a strategic dialogue with external affairs minister S Jaishankar that is expected to focus on strengthening the partnership in security, trade and technology, and the situation in the Indo-Pacific, people familiar with the matter said.

This will be Motegi’s first visit to India in his current stint as foreign minister and is part of a nine-day tour of West Asia and Asia that includes Israel, Palestine, Qatar and the Philippines. He is set to hold the strategic dialogue with Jaishankar on Friday, the people said on condition of anonymity.

The dialogue will be an opportunity for the two sides to take stock of bilateral cooperation amid wide-ranging changes on the global stage because of the policies of the Trump administration in the US. India and Japan are also partners in the Quad, whose leaders’ summit, to be hosted by New Delhi, continues to be surrounded by uncertainty because of the current strains in ties between New Delhi and Washington.

Motegi will also be the first senior member of the new government led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to travel to India. Takaichi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi met on the margins of the G20 Summit in South Africa last November and reaffirmed their commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Modi’s visit to Tokyo last August for an annual summit led to several important outcomes, including Japan setting a target of 10 trillion yen ($68 billion) for private investments in India over a decade and a 10-year roadmap for enhanced economic cooperation in areas such as technology, digitalisation and rare earth minerals.

Takaichi has spoken of working towards tangible results in a wide range of fields such as security and defence and the economy based on the Japan-India joint vision for the next decade launched last year. She has also said she aims to leverage the strengths of both countries to foster innovation and growth in critical and emerging technologies such as semiconductors and AI, and to bolster cooperation in economic security.