If you ask me which of the last two India-Japan summits mattered more, my answer is that Tokyo in 2025 was more important symbolically and New Delhi in 2026 was more successful in what it actually produced. That is not a contradiction. The two summits were, in a sense, two acts of the same play.

Tokyo set the political ceiling. Mr Modi and Prime Minister Takaichi agreed on a Joint Vision for the Next Decade, a ¥10 trillion investment ambition for India, and a critical minerals partnership explicitly framed around diversifying supply chains away from over-reliance on any one country. Everyone understood who that one country was. That summit told you where the relationship was heading.

New Delhi filled that ceiling with content. The 16th India-Japan Annual Summit produced the UNICORN naval mast co-development agreement, a Joint Declaration on Economic Security covering semiconductors, critical minerals, ICT, clean energy and pharmaceuticals, a Joint Statement on AI, the Next Generation Mobility Partnership, and agreement to review the fifteen-year-old Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA). The way I read it, Tokyo announced the ambition and New Delhi began the execution. A partnership that was mostly about intent has started becoming one about delivery.

What UNICORN actually means and why it is larger than it looks

Let me be direct about UNICORN, because Indian commentary has been somewhat vague about what the project is and what it means strategically. Technically, it is an integrated naval mast that hides multiple antennas and sensors inside a single radome, reducing a warship's radar cross-section while improving its communications, electronic support measures, and navigation capability simultaneously. In simpler terms: Indian Navy ships equipped with UNICORN will be harder for adversaries to detect and better at detecting adversaries. Given that China has built one of the most sophisticated naval ISR networks in the Indian Ocean, including satellite surveillance and radar fingerprinting of individual hull signatures, this is a direct operational response to a direct operational threat.

But the technology itself is not the most important thing about UNICORN. The most important thing is what it signals. This is the first fully realised India-Japan defence co-production project since the Transfer of Defence Equipment and Technology Agreement in 2015. For eleven years, that agreement sat on paper while conversations about joint platforms, including the US-2 amphibious aircraft, stalled repeatedly. UNICORN broke that pattern. Bharat Electronics Limited will co-produce the system with NEC Corporation, alongside Sampa Kogyo K.K. and The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd. — which means India gains not just the product but the design and integration knowledge that goes with it. That knowledge compounds.

If I have to take into consideration the benefits of this summit, my assessment of the cost-benefit here is clear: decisively in India's favour. The technology is defensive and non-lethal, which preserves India's argument that it is building capacity with like-minded partners without entering a formal alliance. Beijing will read it as India and Japan tightening their coordination within the Indo-Pacific architecture. They are not wrong. But India has a defensible answer to that reading, and UNICORN gives it a concrete capability it did not have before.

The institutional framework that enabled UNICORN itself carries substantial significance. India becomes only the second Asian country, after the Philippines, to receive advanced Japanese defence technology under Tokyo's revised export control framework introduced following Japan's security policy recalibration. Prime Minister Takaichi's own overhaul of Japan's arms export legislation in April 2026 — permitting substantially wider defence technology transfer to strategically aligned partners — created the legal and policy basis on which the UNICORN agreement now rests. The Memorandum of Implementation signed at the Indian Embassy in Tokyo on 15 November 2024 provided the operational architecture. The 16th Annual Summit converted that architecture into announced co-development. The trajectory, in policy terms, has moved with substantive deliberateness.

Why China's reaction to the critical minerals agreement was so predictable

Beijing's foreign ministry response to the India-Japan critical minerals Memorandum of Cooperation was almost textbook. Whenever an economic security arrangement explicitly targets diversification away from Chinese structural dominance, Beijing frames it as targeting a third party. In this case, they know exactly what is at stake.

China controls the processing of roughly 60 per cent of global rare earth minerals and over 80 per cent of several battery-critical materials. That is not just a market position. It is leverage, and Beijing has used it before. In 2010, it restricted rare earth exports to Japan during a maritime dispute. The Modi-Takaichi Joint Statement criticised economic coercion and arbitrary export restrictions that disrupt critical mineral supply chains. That language was not accidental. It was a direct reference to exactly that pattern of behaviour.

What the Memorandum of Cooperation does that irritates Beijing specifically is chip away at three things simultaneously: China's near-monopoly supplier role, its ability to use export controls for political signalling, and its broader leverage over both India and Japan in clean energy and high-tech manufacturing. The document covers joint exploration and investments in third countries, information sharing on stockpiles, and cooperation on regulations. That is not a purchase agreement. It is infrastructure for long-term supply chain independence.

The real question China should be asking is not whether India and Japan are targeting it. The real question is whether the economic architecture Beijing has built around mineral dependency is as durable as it assumed. The India-Japan Memorandum of Cooperation is one data point suggesting it is not.

What this partnership means for the region's balance

For the United States, a deeper India-Japan axis is close to a strategic force multiplier. Washington has been encouraging Tokyo to relax its arms export rules and become a net security provider rather than a net security consumer. It sees India as the anchor democratic partner in the Indian Ocean leg of the Indo-Pacific architecture. When India and Japan move simultaneously on AI, semiconductors, critical minerals, defence co-development, and economic security, it thickens the non-Chinese layer of the regional ecosystem that US strategy needs. That thickening is happening regardless of whether there is a Quad leaders' summit or not, which is worth noting given how much attention the missed India-hosted summit has received.

For China, the picture is less comfortable. Beijing already worries about encirclement by US treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Australia. When India and Japan coordinate on critical minerals, defence co-production, and economic security, it reduces China's ability to use single-source dependencies as leverage against either country. UNICORN on Indian naval vessels, Japan-Philippines defence exports, and India-Japan supply chain diversification all complicate China's ability to dominate its maritime periphery. Beijing can call this a bloc or a threat or whatever framing it chooses. The practical effect on China's leverage is the same regardless of the label.

My own sense is that India and Japan will continue denying the anti-China framing, and they are right to do so both strategically and diplomatically. But functionally, the more they coordinate on technology, minerals, and defence co-production, the more the regional balance shifts. Intent and effect are not always the same thing in geopolitics.

The Quad question and what New Delhi should learn from it

The Quad summit that India was supposed to host in late 2025 did not happen. President Trump's public tariff threats and his repeated claims about mediating India-Pakistan tensions created political friction in Delhi that made hosting a photogenic multilateral event untenable. Some commentary has read this as a sign of Quad weakness. The way I read it, it is a sign of something more useful: India's instinct to protect the substance of partnerships from the noise of Washington politics.

The bilateral India-Japan Summit produced more concrete deliverables than most Quad summits have managed. That tells you something important. The Quad is valuable as a strategic signal. Issue-based bilateral and trilateral frameworks — India-Japan on minerals, US-Japan-Australia on the Pacific Islands, India-Japan-Philippines on maritime security — are where actual delivery happens. The missed summit has probably pushed New Delhi toward a more flexible model of strategic cooperation that does not depend on all four countries moving together on every issue. That is a healthier model than the alternative.

India should take one clear lesson from this. Never put strategic progress exclusively in a multilateral basket that depends on the mood of any single leader in any single capital. The bilateral with Japan is moving. The bilateral with Australia is deepening. That is the architecture that survives political turbulence in Washington.

The one number that explains the relationship's unfinished business

Bilateral India-Japan trade stood at approximately USD 27.48 billion in FY 2025-26. India's exports accounted for USD 6 billion of that. Japan was India's tenth-largest trading partner. India was Japan's fourteenth. Both numbers are far below what the depth of the strategic partnership would suggest. The CEPA review agreed at this Summit is the right response, but reviewing a fifteen-year-old agreement is a process that takes years to produce results, and non-tariff barriers — which are the real obstacle for Indian pharmaceuticals and agricultural products accessing the Japanese market — require detailed technical negotiation that outlasts most political summits.

That trade gap is the relationship's most significant underperformance. Everything else — the defence co-production, the minerals Memorandum of Cooperation, the AI partnership, the mobility framework — is impressive. But if India and Japan cannot get their bilateral trade to a level that reflects the depth of their strategic alignment, they are leaving economic weight on the table that would make their coordination considerably more powerful. UNICORN is the right signal. Closing the trade gap is the right next challenge.

The trajectory

Take the four dimensions together — the defence-industrial breakthrough that UNICORN represents; the Economic Security Declaration that anchors semiconductors, critical minerals, ICT, clean energy and pharmaceuticals into a unified cooperation framework; the AI Joint Statement and Next Generation Mobility Partnership that extend the technological dimension of the partnership; and the CEPA review that acknowledges the economic-trade gap requires substantive institutional attention — and what emerges is a substantively different partnership from the one that existed a year ago. Tokyo 2025 and New Delhi 2026 will, in retrospect, be read as the two summits at which the India-Japan Special Strategic and Global Partnership crossed from doctrinal potential into operational reality.

The wider institutional architecture — the ¥10 trillion Japanese investment ambition materialising through 120 private-sector agreements showcased at the Summit; the 2+2 ministerial format agreed for later in 2026; the strategic stockpiling cooperation on crude oil and petroleum products; the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech sector agreements — reinforces the analytical read that this is a partnership entering its most consequential phase.

For India, the strategic gain from the Summit is unambiguously substantial. UNICORN provides a concrete defensive capability the Indian Navy did not previously possess. The Economic Security Declaration provides institutional insurance against exactly the kind of supply-chain coercion that both India and Japan have identified as a strategic vulnerability. The AI Joint Statement anchors what will be one of the most consequential technology cooperation frameworks of the coming decade. The Mobility Partnership integrates India's rapidly expanding electric-vehicle and battery ecosystem with Japan's substantial capability in the same categories. The CEPA review, if executed rigorously, closes the economic-trade underperformance that has held the relationship back from its full potential.

The next twelve months will be the test. UNICORN production at BEL needs to move from announced co-development to delivered systems. The Economic Security Declaration needs to translate into specific supply-chain arrangements that actually reduce mineral dependencies. The AI Joint Statement needs to produce operational R&D collaboration. The CEPA review needs to make substantive progress on non-tariff barriers. The 2+2 ministerial meeting needs to consolidate the security and defence trajectory. If those deliverables materialise, India-Japan will, by the 17th Annual Summit in Tokyo in 2027, be operating one of the most substantive Special Strategic and Global Partnerships anywhere in the international system.

Tokyo announced the ambition. New Delhi began the execution. The trajectory is now well-established; the substantive delivery has commenced. The next year will determine how much of the announced architecture becomes operational reality.

About the author

Dr Sudhanshu Kumar is a Subject Matter Expert on Artificial Intelligence, Cyberwarfare and Cybersecurity at CENJOWS — the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, an autonomous think tank under Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS), Ministry of Defence, Government of India. He holds a PhD on "AI and Security Policy" from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations), Moscow. His scholarly work focuses on artificial intelligence, cyberspace, security policy, and the philosophy of technology.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of CENJOWS, the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff, the Ministry of Defence, or the Government of India.