India Archive

On his visit to Vietnam in mid-September, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee assured his hosts that India would always be their “all-weather friend.” While some may read too much into the timing of that statement, delivered on the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s trip to India, agreements signed by India and Vietnam on energy and defense during Mukherjee’s visit are certain to get Beijing’s attention. After all, they come at a time when China and Vietnam have renewed negotiations over their maritime disputes in the South China Sea and as India pushes back against China’s plans for maritime expansion across […]

China pledged investments worth $20 billion to India and the two neighbors signed more than a dozen agreements and committed to settling their contentious border disputes during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s maiden official visit to India, which began Wednesday and ends today. Over the next five years, China promised to help India upgrade its rail system and put in place high-speed train corridors. It has also promised to invest in roads and two industrial parks in Gujarat and Maharashtra states, and to give more market access to products from India. The two nations called for better people-to-people ties and more […]

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on Sept. 12-13 may have been one of the organization’s most important. After years of stasis, the group’s heads-of-state summit finally agreed to consider expanding the organization’s membership, which has remained fixed since its foundation in 2001. They also adopted several other important measures promoting regional development, as well as a political declaration that lent support to Russian and Chinese positions in those countries’ disagreements with the U.S. and the West more broadly. But the SCO still faces several obstacles to expanding its role in Eurasia. After the instability engendered by […]

A new love affair is blossoming in Asia. Like so many who have entered the rarefied air of romance, the protagonists, India and Japan, are starry-eyed and filled with expectations that theirs is a relationship of unusual depth, one that was meant to be. They may be right. There is one obstacle that remains a roadblock—differences over nuclear strategy—but that should not obscure the fact that relations between two of Asia’s major powers are growing closer, and there are many reasons to expect this to continue. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi just completed a visit to Japan, something of a […]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan in the first week of September generated huge expectations in both New Delhi and Tokyo. During Modi’s first bilateral visit outside the subcontinent, Tokyo and New Delhi agreed to upgrade their annual strategic dialogue to the level of foreign and defense ministers. Tokyo also lifted its ban on six Indian firms involved in defense research and development, which dated back to India’s 1998 nuclear weapons tests, paving the way for the transfer of Japanese military technology to India. Japanese Prime Minister Abe also assured Modi that Japan will invest around $35 billion […]

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s visit to India last week highlighted the two countries’ increasingly complementary geoeconomic objectives. The visit saw the conclusion of a much-delayed bilateral civil nuclear cooperation agreement that paves the way for uranium exports from Australia’s high-quality mines to fuel India’s ambitious nuclear energy plans. While in value terms future Australian uranium exports may not seem like much, they will actually enable India to undertake its next wave of industrialization in a more carbon-competitive manner, and that in turn will fuel massive demand for other Australian mineral exports. The strategic nature of the India-Australia alignment is […]