The visiting Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, find their carefully planned party this week to celebrate the world’s newest strategic partnership ruined by their domestic political opponents.

After his big defeat in last month’s elections to the Upper House of the Japanese Diet, Abe is fighting for political survival. Singh, too, is under pressure from his communist allies for the ‘sin’ of engineering independent India’s greatest diplomatic victory — the liberation of the nation from three and a half decades of nuclear isolation. In politics no good deed ever goes without being punished.

Underlying the political instability staring at Abe and Singh is the deeper challenge of getting Japan and India to overcome decades of reactive foreign policy and end the historic under-performance of the two nations on the Asian and global political stage. As Abe and Singh try to establish Japan and India as great powers, they face strong domestic political reaction.

In Japan it goes by the name of “pacifism” that has become a cover for avoiding regional and global responsibility. In India it is called “non-alignment”. When India is well on its way to become the world’s third largest economy, and poised to shape the security order in Asia, our communists want India to stay for ever the third world subaltern mouthing empty slogans.

For different reasons, both Japan and India were unable in the second half of the 20th century to fulfil their national aspirations for leading Asia and securing a seat at the global high table. Defeated in the Second World War, Japan consciously chose to forgo great power aspirations in favour of an undiluted focus on national reconstruction.

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