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Text of report by Siddharth Varadarajan headlined "India, Japan say new security ties not directed against China" published by Indian newspaper The Hindu website on 23 October
Tokyo: On a day that saw India and Japan sign a declaration on security cooperation and assert that their partnership would be "an essential pillar for the future architecture of the region," it was left to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to introduce a harsh dose of reality by reminding an elite gathering of Japanese and Indian businessmen that the increase in India's bilateral trade with China in the past one year alone is more than the whole of India's total trade with Japan.
That one statistic was not intended to minimise the importance India attaches to its "strategic and global partnership" with Japan, Indian officials said, but merely to drive home the point that India was not going to allow its ties with Tokyo to affect its relations with Beijing. Indeed, in a press conference at the residence of Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso on Wednesday [22 October] evening, Dr. Singh sought to emphasise that India's economic relations and security cooperation with Japan would not be "at the cost of any third country, least of all China."
Though the security declaration largely contains elements like joint exercises, disaster management and counter-terrorism which figure in Indian agreements with many countries, what is likely to raise eyebrows around Asia is the fact that Japan considers India so crucial to its strategic calculus that it is only the third country -- after the United States and Australia -- with which it has signed such...