The idea of a Japan–India partnership in the Indo-Pacific has today acquired an almost axiomatic status in strategic discourse. It is routinely invoked as a stabilizing force, a democratic counterweight, and a pillar of the emerging regional order.
Yet, to appreciate the depth and potential of this partnership in the 21st century, it is essential to look backwards before rushing forward—to understand how Japan and India conducted themselves in the 20th century, often under trying and asymmetric circumstances, and how those historical choices now shape their contemporary convergence.
During the Second World War, India was not initially a central concern in Japan’s strategic imagination. Japan’s war effort was focused on East and Southeast Asia, and India entered its calculations only at a late stage. The war years thus did not produce a natural foundation for a bilateral partnership.
Instead, they generated a complex legacy marked by defeat, occupation, reparations, and the remaking of Asia’s political order under American primacy. Japan lost the war; India emerged as an independent nation but immediately confronted the dilemmas of Cold War geopolitics and postcolonial state-building.
In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender, the shaping of postwar Japan took place largely without Indian participation. The United States invited the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China to join the Far Eastern Advisory Commission (FEC).
Still, India’s voice was marginal despite its moral stature as a soon-to-be independent Asian power. By December 1945, a consensus had formed around the FEC, embedding Japan within a US-led security and economic framework. This exclusion could have fostered resentment. Instead, India chose a markedly different path.
Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, serving at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial) from May 3, 1946 to November 12, 1948, delivered a historic 1,235-page dissent in November 1948, rejecting the prosecution of Japanese leaders for Class A “crimes against peace” as ex post facto law and condemning “victor’s justice.”
While acknowledging wartime atrocities, he firmly distinguished between Japan’s militarist elite and the Japanese people, arguing against collective punishment and concluding that the accused could not be legally convicted under international law.
Though his dissent was not accepted and seven leaders were executed on December 23, 1948, Pal’s judgment sent a powerful moral signal that India stood with the Japanese people, a stance later reinforced by India’s refusal to seek reparations in 1952, laying an ethical foundation for enduring India–Japan goodwill.