New Delhi \u2013 India and Japan on Thursday agreed to bolster security ties including maritime cooperation after their defense ministers met in New Delhi.<\/p>\n
Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and his Indian counterpart Rajnath Singh held talks and signed a memorandum on maritime security cooperation, according to a joint statement.<\/p>\n
Both countries are members of the \u201cQuad\u201d security alliance along with the United States and Australia, a group seen as a counterweight to China\u2019s expanding presence in the Indian Ocean and wider Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe two ministers affirmed their commitment … to further deepen defence cooperation to realize a free and open Indo-Pacific,\u201d the joint statement said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuch cooperation is vital not only to Japan and India, but also to the region and the international community.\u201d<\/p>\n
New Delhi has been keen for Tokyo\u2019s greater involvement with its capital and technology to aid India\u2019s push towards building a domestic military hardware industry.<\/p>\n
The ministers said the two countries should explore joint development in naval shipbuilding and design, combining Tokyo\u2019s technological expertise with New Delhi\u2019s production capabilities under its \u201cMake in India\u201d initiative.<\/p>\n
Koizumi\u2019s visit comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi in July, when they agreed to work more closely on critical minerals \u2014 a sector dominated by China.<\/p>\n
After that meeting, Takaichi had warned that Japan and India were facing challenges including \u201cweaponization of the economy and nonmarket policies and practices.\u201d<\/p>\n
China\u2019s foreign ministry, in comments following Modi\u2019s meeting with Takaichi, said that international cooperation \u201cshould not target or harm the interests of third parties, let alone serve as a pretext for forming exclusive cliques or stoking confrontation\u201c.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Delhi \u2013 India and Japan on Thursday agreed to bolster security ties including maritime cooperation after their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[360,1468,290,1213,8,2311],"class_list":["post-77439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-defense","tag-defense-ministry","tag-india","tag-india-japan-relations","tag-japan","tag-shinjiro-koizumi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}