In a thoughtful commentary for The National Interest published on January 24 (“A Fine Balance: India, Japan and the United States”), Dhruva Jaishankar used the occasion of a New Delhi visit by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to discuss the evolving relationship between Asia’s second- and third-largest economies. Jaishankar identified strategic advantages that both could realize through security collaboration, and also emphasized the importance of Japan-India ties for the United States, arguing that “there are good enough reasons for all three countries to invest further in trilateral security cooperation,” even as each is wary of antagonizing China.

In his final paragraph, Jaishankar observes that India makes a particularly appealing partner for Japan because New Delhi broached no objection to Abe’s December 26 visit Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni shrine—a move that not only exacerbated tensions with China and further alienated should-be ally South Korea, but also elicited public “disappointment” from Washington. Even as other Asian nations were still fuming over Abe’s visit to a religious edifice that, since 1978, has enshrined the souls of fourteen men convicted of “Class A” war crimes after World War II, New Delhi was preparing to welcome Japan’s hawkish premier with open arms.

Indeed, far from dividing Japan and India, the twentieth century actually provides each country with a narrative that may facilitate future cooperation, reinforcing a sense of shared purpose and personal affinity between their leaders. While the historical roots of ongoing Sino-Japanese animosity are widely understood, fewer in the West are familiar with the events that poisoned relations between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China before either state had reached the age of fifteen. Not only does India share a rival with Japan, but the slim history of these nations’ own bilateral relationship also includes a strange chapter which might have faded into obscurity if not for Abe’s personal obsession with the past.

Even if history will not drive the India-Japan relationship, themes drawn from the last century have been prominent in several of their leaders’ recent interactions, and will backdrop any future cooperation. Some of these historical narratives are disquieting—and although the United States should certainly welcome bilateral and trilateral initiatives that could reduce the cost of hedging against Chinese aggression, Washington must also keep a watchful eye on the Indo-Japanese relationship as it evolves, lest U.S. policy in Asia become overexposed to nationalist passions unrelated to American interest.

AT THEIR BIRTHS, in 1949 and 1950, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India may have looked like natural allies, each newly liberated from foreign domination, and now facing the inestimable challenge of governing and feeding a vast and largely impoverished population. Moreover, while India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, may not have been a communist, he was nonetheless a man of the left, who burned with an unrivaled hatred of imperialism. Two decades earlier, Nehru had worked alongside the widow of Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen in the League Against Imperialism; and in 1940, Nehru had received a note of solidarity from Mao Zedong, saying that the liberation of India and China would serve as a “signal of the emancipation of all the down-trodden and oppressed” around the world.
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Like Mao, however, Nehru was also a passionate nationalist, and understood from the outset of his premiership the danger that could be posed by a revival of Chinese confidence and power. The proximate irritant in the bilateral relationship was the issue of Himalayan borders, left in a shambles after Britain’s hasty retreat from the Subcontinent in 1947. Most notably, two large pieces of noncontiguous territory were now subject to overlapping Sino-Indian claims: Aksai Chin, a frigid wilderness at the nexus of Kashmir, Xinjiang and Tibet; and a more hospitable region now known as Arunachal Pradesh, which shares borders with Bhutan and Burma.

Sino-Indian tensions mounted over these and other issues during the late 1950s, particularly after 1959, when India granted asylum to Tibet’s Dalai Lama and appeared to be growing closer to the Soviet Union just as Beijing and Moscow were drifting apart. In October 1962, after years of border skirmishes, Mao responded to Nehru’s adoption of a “forward policy” along the perimeters by launching simultaneous attacks in each of the disputed regions. Although China won a decisive victory in the brief war that followed, Beijing did not elect to seize all the territory that it claimed, but essentially reset the prewar status quo, holding desolate Aksai Chin for itself while withdrawing from Arunachal Pradesh, which is today similar in size and population to the state of Maine. (China did not, however, drop its claim to most of the latter region, a stance reiterated by a map added to Chinese passports in 2012.)

But this calculated show of magnanimity did little to assuage Indian humiliation and resentment, and since 1962, the temperature of Sino-Indian relations has rarely risen much above freezing. Over the decades that followed, Beijing built an “evergreen friendship” with India’s archnemesis, Pakistan, while New Delhi deepened its own ties to the Soviets. Despite a thaw after the Cold War, when the two nuclear-armed giants signed a pair of accords designed to reduce the risk of conflict on the disputed borders, many strategists in each country still regard the other as an aspiring regional hegemon, seeking to control the vital sea lanes of communication which connect Asia to the Persian Gulf. Although China remains anxious about India in the context of Tibet, these fears tend to run higher in New Delhi—where leading public intellectuals warn of Chinese “territorial creep,” and raise alarm at the “widening power differential” that has resulted from their state’s failure to match their neighbor’s explosive growth.

For the United States, which desires a peaceful and profitable relationship with Beijing, rising Sinophobia in India could easily become a source of risk. Although the White House was wholly justified in including the East China Sea under the aegis of the U.S.-Japan security pact, Washington has no reason to become entangled in a pair of Himalayan spats which have already triggered one war and remain a source of instability (despite recent efforts to improve communication). India is, by any measure, a remarkable nation, and a growing force in world affairs—but it is also a land where nationalist passions run high, and there is no reason to assume that its priorities regarding China will always dovetail with those of the United States.

IN CONTRAST with the record of Sino-Indian tension, New Delhi has traditionally enjoyed warm, if limited, relations with the other major power in Northeast Asia. Japan’s modernization after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 initially served as a source of inspiration to intellectuals across Asia, who saw in Tokyo a model for resisting Western domination. Although Japanese “pan-Asianism” soon lost its luster across the rest of East Asia, as it was used in the service of colonial conquest, some Indian nationalists, like Subhas Chandra Bose, were happy to embrace any power that could help bring down the British Raj. (A distinguished exception was the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose profound admiration for Japan waned as that country was consumed by ultranationalism.) When, in the final two years of the Pacific War, the Japanese Imperial Army fought in Burma and eastern India, it received nominal assistance from the men and women of Bose’s Indian National Army.

These events had little impact on the course of the war, but have never been forgotten on the Japanese right. Indeed, they appear to be of special interest to Shinzo Abe, whose well-known affection for India is linked to his lifelong personal quest to erase the dominant narrative of Japan’s imperial rise. For Abe, the Pacific War was essentially a defensive struggle, and the men who led the war effort—including, most notably, his maternal grandfather—sincere patriots. Positively inflammatory in China and Korea, this revisionist perspective receives a respectful hearing in India, and Abe has cannily incorporated it into his pitch when visiting New Delhi.

In 2007, during a previous term as prime minister, Abe delivered an address before India’s Parliament, in which he proposed a “strategic global partnership” between Tokyo and New Delhi, as part of a broader “arc of freedom and prosperity” uniting democracies around the Pacific Rim. In the same brief speech, however, he also cited Bose—still popular in India, but notorious in the West for embracing Nazi Germany as well as Imperial Japan—as an exemplar of the “attraction” which has long existed between the two nations. Abe then informed the Indian legislators he would be making a pilgrimage to Kolkata, where he would pay his respects to the elderly son of Radhabinod Pal, an Indian judge who famously dissented from the guilty verdicts of the postwar Tokyo Trials.

As lengthy as it was caustic, Pal’s opinion argued that the United States had provoked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor, and compared the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the worst crimes of the Nazis. An ardent Indian nationalist, Pal excoriated the Allies for their hypocrisy in prosecuting Japan’s wartime leaders while ignoring the sins of Europe’s empire builders. In voting to acquit, Pal did not deny that Japan had indeed committed atrocities (on that point, he acknowledged, the evidence was “overwhelming”), but instead objected that the notion of “crimes against peace,” with which the “Class A” defendants had been charged, was conjured up ex post facto, rendering the trials a “sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.”