New Delhi: A new book on Japan’s influential and longest-serving prime minister Shinzo Abe has shed more light on his lasting contribution to the country’s economics, politics and foreign policy.
In “The Importance of Shinzo Abe: India, Japan and the Indo-Pacific”, editor and policy analyst Sanjaya Baru brings together several experts from diverse backgrounds to evaluate Abe’s involvement with global society, and particularly with India and the Indo-Pacific.
The book includes essays by 16 experts from both India and Japan, and has a foreword by India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar.
At the launch, Jaishankar said he was glad that the book was “not just a collection of personal memories, but that it was actually called ‘The Importance of Shinzo Abe’. That the intent of this book was to, in a sense, evaluate him and his contributions and his views”.
Jaishankar said very few would feature like Abe if one “one were to look at the last quarter century of certainly Asian politics, possibly even global politics”.
He added: “Japan’s security and prosperity is secured by its alliance relationship. That is the bedrock on which Japanese policies are based. Abe’s genius was to understand that and look beyond it, [not in terms of] a world without alliances but alliances coexisting with other relationships. It is a far more loosely structured, less legalistically committed and a much more multipolar world.”
In the foreword, the minister touched upon Abe’s assassination at a political rally in Nara last July. He wrote: “Shinzo Abe was an exception because of his political boldness, his perceptive grasp of global changes, and not least, the political longevity to translate ideas into reality. And that is why his tragic assassination is a loss that is felt so deeply across the world.”
Sanjaya Baru, media adviser to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, noted in his article – “Abe and the Evolution of India-Japan Relations” – how the two countries’ relations were nurtured since the 50s from the time of Abe’s grandfather and former PM Nobusuke Kishi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
“In seeking a balance between bilateral interests and values on the one hand and regional and global interests and concerns on the other, Abe sought to reinvigorate the roots of the India–Japan relationship…,” Baru wrote.
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