Modi, who along with Abe will visit Varanasi later in the day, said culture and people breathe life into a relationship.
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Apparently, the Indian side gave assurances to Japan’s strong non-proliferation lobby to expedite the deal, the Japanese preferred to play safe and sought time for Prime Minister Abe to convince the Japanese parliament on the assurances.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (L) at the signing ceremony, in New Delhi on Saturday.
The 16 agreements signed including those related to Make in India, bullet train and civil nuclear energy, will prove to be important milestones in the bilateral relations, it said.
With India assuring Japan that it will become a full member in the four global nuclear export control regimes, Tokyo also moved forward and made a decision to ink a pact with New Delhi to cooperate on peaceful uses of nuclear energy after finalising the technical details.
“I cannot think of a strategic partnership that can exercise a more profound influence on shaping the course of Asia and our interlinked ocean regions more than ours”, Modi said at a joint news conference with Abe on Saturday.
Jaishankar did not cite a timeline for signing the final agreement with Japan.
The Japanese will build a railway line between Mumbai and Ahmedabad and are hoping to build other links.
On the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) issue, he said India had put it behind with Japan’s help in 2008 itself when the nuclear suppliers group decided to make an exception for India. He pointed out that there were serious challenges emerging between China and Japan.
Similarly, the much-anticipated sale of 12 Japanese US-2i Amphibious aircraft – worth $1.3 billion – to India was not concluded as the bilateral working group continues to discuss technology transfer and licensed production, an issue that has been lingering for two years.
Modi said India and Japan will work together in East Asia Summit to promote an inclusive, balanced and open regional architecture and maritime security in the region. “They also urged North Korea to address at the earliest the abductions issue”, the statement said.
Recalling his last visit to the country, Modi said Japan committed an investment of $35 billion.
“This enterprise will launch a revolution in Indian railways and speed up India’s journey into the future”, Modi said of the deal. As far as Japan is concerned, after deal with Taiwan in 2007, this deal with India would be the second successful case of Japan exporting its bullet train technology to a foreign market.
“The two prime ministers, on the occasion of the 70th year since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reaffirmed their shared commitment to the total elimination of nuclear weapons”. Abe and Modi called for freedom of navigation in worldwide waters. Under Abe, Japan has shifted away from 70 years of post-war pacifism, and the country recently lifted a decades-old ban on arms exports.
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Regarding reprocessing, Jaishanker said that it has been a long standing position of India that reprocessing was an integral part of the its nuclear programme because the manner in which it ran its nuclear programme it needed the spent fuel to be reprocessed and not allow it to accumulate.
