What are the notable features of the recently concluded pact or the Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA) between India and Japan? How is it likely to address the security concerns of India? (2020, 15 Marks)
The Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) was signed in New Delhi on 9 September 2020 by Defence Secretary Ajay Kumar and Japan’s Ambassador Suzuki Satoshi, while Indian and Chinese troops faced each other in eastern Ladakh. It entered into force on 11 July 2021. It is a reciprocal logistics framework, not an alliance, and its value lies in giving India reach and partners at sea.
Notable features
- Reciprocity: the Indian Armed Forces and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces can supply each other food, water, fuel, transport, spare parts, repair and maintenance, medical care, accommodation, and airfield and port services.
- Defined occasions: bilateral exercises and training, UN peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, port visits, and other activities both sides agree on.
- Standard settlement: accounting and payment procedures are fixed in advance, so ad hoc support now runs through one routine channel.
- No basing rights: no automatic access, stationing right or obligation to assist; each request is approved case by case.
- Part of a network: Japan became India’s sixth logistics partner, after the United States (LEMOA, 2016), France, Singapore, South Korea and Australia. India was in turn Japan’s sixth ACSA partner, after the US, Australia, the UK, Canada and France.
How it addresses India’s security concerns
- Reach without bases: Indian warships in the western Pacific can draw on Japanese support, Japanese ships can do the same near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Japan’s facility at Djibouti can serve Indian anti-piracy patrols. With its other agreements, the Navy can operate across the Indo-Pacific without an overseas base.
- Chinese naval expansion: the PLA Navy’s Djibouti base and port projects such as Gwadar demand wider Indian deployment. ACSA lowers the cost of Malabar and JAIMEX and of patrols around the Malacca Strait.
- External balancing: in Kenneth N. Waltz’s terms (Theory of International Politics, 1979) it adds a partner’s capacity to one’s own, yet creates no treaty commitment, so strategic autonomy survives. Rajesh Basrur and Sumitha Narayanan Kutty (2021) read India’s Japan policy exactly so: nested partnerships, bilateral to Quad, inside strategic autonomy.
- A platform for more: the UNICORN naval antenna agreement, signed at the July 2026 summit as the first co-development project, awaited Indian internal approval in September 2026. A Memorandum of Arrangement on Maritime Security Cooperation (Rajnath Singh and Shinjiro Koizumi, 20 August 2026) adds maritime domain awareness and mine countermeasures.
- Non-traditional security: faster joint HADR and evacuations, relevant given the 2026 disruption around the Strait of Hormuz.
Limits
ACSA does nothing for the land boundary, where India’s principal threat from China lies. It sets up no joint planning, command or crisis commitment, and Japan’s constitutional limits remain. In John H. Herz’s terms it feeds a security dilemma: Beijing reads such agreements as encirclement.
Conclusion
ACSA meets India’s maritime concerns rather than its continental ones; it makes cooperation cheaper, not certain. As one link in a chain of logistics pacts, it fits India’s preference for partnership without alliance in a free and open Indo-Pacific.