External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday highlighted the potential for semiconductor collaboration between India and Japan, emphasising its significance in reshaping global geopolitical dynamics.

Speaking at the India-Japan Forum, he also indicated that India and Japan are also exploring the possibility of cooperating with Taiwan in this vital sector.

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Referring to India-Japan ties, he said, “We’ve never had problems between India and Japan but not having problems doesn’t mean everything works well… I would say how do you take good sentiment and make it into a practical plan.”

Mr Jaishankar also reflected on the shared experiences of India and Japan in terms of their proximity to China, noting, “In a way, India and Japan do share the attribute of both being neighbours of China.”

In India’s particular case, he said the relationship with China was stable. It was growing in many respects, especially in terms of trade. There had been a certain amount of investment, mostly from China to India. There were some issues like imbalance in trade and market access, he added.

The minister went on to elaborate on the impact of recent tensions with China, particularly after the Galwan Valley clash in June 2020. “Our entire relationship with China was predicated on the fact that the border areas would remain peaceful and stable and we had agreements to ensure that. In 2020, the Chinese chose to bring a lot of forces to the border areas and obviously we responded with counter-deployments. Then we had an incident in which a number of soldiers got killed and obviously this impacted the relationship,” he added.

Mr Jaishankar noted that it has taken India and China over four years to negotiate the disengagement of forces, since they are too close at some places along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

He also spoke about the challenges in de-escalating the situation with China. “We still have challenges left with us. We still have to de-escalate because what we have done is disengage forces from close proximity but we have this issue of de-escalation because there are still a very large number of forces. Now, we have to sit down and discuss with China how we can rebuild our relationship and that is an exercise that still has to be undertaken.”