India should allow Japan to set up war memorials in the Northeast

On a recent visit to Japan, my wife and I went to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where the mortal remains of Japan’s war dead are interred. The shrine is often in the news because every time a key Japanese politician visits it, a storm of protest erupts in Beijing, where the shrine is viewed as the symbol of Japanese militarism.

At the shrine, I pointed out to Vinita the elegant little shrine to Justice Pal, the Indian judge on the War Crimes Tribunal, whose famous dissenting judgements earned him the undying admiration of the Japanese.

Every Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Nara and Kamakura, the ancient capitals of Japan, contain references to India and evidence of Indian influence, on art, philosophy and life in Japan. These reflect the enormous “soft power” India enjoys in Japan.

From defeat to victory
When I worked in Manipur in 1978-80, I visited the beautiful war cemeteries for the Allied war dead in Imphal, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. These were landscaped, manicured, impeccably laid out oases in the midst of a sprawling and noisy city, reflecting the respect and affection with which the thousands of Allied soldiers from Britain have been buried and are still remembered thousands of miles from home.

Field Marshall Slim’s gripping narrative of the war in Burma, Defeat Into Victory, describes the battles fought in this less known theatre of war between powerful armies, with thousands of casualties on both sides. The Imperial Japanese Army was finally halted at the famous battle of the DC’s Tennis Court at Kohima.

That ended the westward thrust of the Japanese, and Kohima and Imphal are forever etched in the memories of all Japanese. I recall hearing of a request from Japan to set up war cemeteries to honour the Japanese war dead being turned down by the Indian Government, and not being able to understand such a decision. Was it a case of the government taking sides in a war long over, and one in which Indians fought with heroism on both sides? 

The INA that fought alongside the Japanese Army hoisted the Indian tricolour for the first time on Indian soil at Moirang, near Imphal, and a tablet there commemorates it. And here was the Government turning down a reasonable request from Japan, 30 years after the war! The Japanese side had even apparently offered to underwrite investments needed for development of the North East.

Links to the past
Today, the world is a very different place. The normally ambivalent foreign policy mandarins in South Block seem to have realised that India’s interests lie in strengthening relations with Japan, in the face of the growing power of China. The US as global hegemon can no longer police the neighbourhood, it’s resources being already stretched in the Middle East, if not in Europe to deter Russia. 

India could play the NE card adroitly, and allow the Japanese to honour their war dead in a manner they see fit. This gesture would fetch India many brownie points, including the possibility of investment in the North East in roads, power projects, bridges and inland waterways. The North East would then dramatically emerge from years of neglect.

It would not be unrealistic to envisage a network of highways and roads knitting together the cities of SW and W China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and the NE region of India. 

(The writer is a former IAS officer turned entrepreneur, and author of ‘On a clear day you can see India’)