New Delhi: Japan continues to hope that India will reconsider its decision to leave Asia’s largest free trade pact and sign onto the dotted line by 2020, Japanese economy, trade and industry minister said in Bangkok on Tuesday.
A day earlier, India had announced that it had conveyed its decision to the other 15 participating countries not to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement. “This reflects both our assessment of the current global situation as well as the fairness and balance of the agreement. India had significant issues of core interest that remain unresolved,” MEA Secretary (East) Vijay Thakur Singh had said.
RCEP was supposed to economically bring together all 10 ASEAN states, along with Australia, India, Japan, China, South Korea and New Zealand.
India’s decision was made public after the joint leaders’ statement after the RCEP summit announced that 15 countries have concluded text-based negotiations “for all 20 chapters and essentially all their market access issues; and tasked legal scrubbing by them to commence for signing in 2020.”
On India, the statement said that all RCEP participating countries will work together to resolve “these outstanding issues in a mutually satisfactory way”. “India’s final decision will depend on satisfactory resolution of these issues,” the statement noted.
Japan, which had been keen that India should remain in RCEP to avoid domination of the group by one country, publicly felt that New Delhi could be still part of the economic agreement.
“Japan will continue to play a leading role toward an early agreement of the 16 nations, including India, and for a signing of the agreement by the end of 2020,” Kajiyama said, as reported by Asahi Shimbun.
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Interestingly, Kajiyama indicated that all the countries still shared the understanding that future negotiations for “legal scrubbing” would include all the 16 countries.
“We have not confirmed that India was actually leaving the process,” he added.
Singapore prime Lee Hsien Loong had also expressed regret that India was not part of RCEP, but “we hope one day it will come on board”.
“We hope one day that it will be possible, either because we can overcome the specific issues that are outstanding or India takes a different perspective, (for us to) come together and India will be part of the group,” he stated, as quoted by Channel News Asia.
Unlike Japan, China has asserted that the RCEP could be inked without India. “There won’t be any problem for the 15 nations to sign RCEP next year… We are taking an open attitude — whenever India is ready, it’s welcome to get onboard,” said Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng on Monday, according to Bloomberg.
While India had not blamed China in its public remarks on Monday, Indian government sources had maintained that the key issues that led to New Delhi’s withdrawal were a possible import surge from countries like China and no credible assurances on market access and non-tariff barriers.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had told the closed-door meeting of the RCEP summit that the pact would not respect the interests of all Indians.