Shinzo Abe's sudden resignation is a good opportunity for me to post this editorial I wrote, and then forgot about, after his visit to India in August. Japan is the ideal case study of the tension between pacifist ideological commitments and militant strategic commitment, and the potential damage that tension can do to the guts of a country's character.

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Speaking to Indian parliamentarians on August 24th, Shinzo Abe recalled the warm meeting between Jawaharlal Nehru and Nobosuke Kishi, the Prime Ministers of India and Japan fifty years ago. Abe proposed that we should resume building the "arc of freedom" between Asia’s two most prominent democracies. Nostalgia about Mr Kishi, who was Mr Abe’s own grandfather, is a historical keystone in this vision of an Asian axis of democracy.

Kishi’s legacy is, in fact, monumental, but it has little to do with reinforcing the democratic tradition in Japan. A top Minister in the wartime government, Kishi had been classified a war criminal by the US Occupation Authority, but was quickly rehabilitated when they began to realize the need for a heavy-handed, centralized, anti-Communist administration - in short, one not far removed from the War Government it was replacing.

Kishi quickly became the leader of a Liberal Democratic Party that was a long stretch from being either liberal or democratic. Rather, the LDP was the hegemon in a single-party-dominated system, supported by an undisguised nexus of bureaucracy and big business (the kereitsu) as well as millions of dollars from the CIA, thus postponing a democratic transition until as recently as 1993. During this four-decade hegemony, the LDP ran the country as an efficient "Developmental State," with the single-minded policy priority of industrial growth and global market-dominance. The policy was a dramatic success but came at the cost of Japan’s internal democratic integrity and external sovereignty.

Kishi’s government was the embodiment of this trade-off. The iconic moment of his rule was in 1960, three years after his celebrated trip to India. The AMPO Treaty, which outlined the security relationship between the US and Japan, was to come up for reauthorization before the Diet, the Japanese parliament. The AMPO was the instrument that underlined Japan’s role as a militarized Cold War ally – America’s "unsinkable aircraft carrier" - and is still used, as with the Japanese deployment in Iraq, to authorize military actions that seem to contravene the strongly pacifist Constitution. In 1960, the reauthorization faced huge popular opposition. Kishi signed the treaty, but became impatient as its ratification was delayed by Parliamentary debate. Kishi ordered the police to eject opposition MPs, and bulldozed the Bill through.

According to correspondent Patrick Smith, hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens swarmed to the Diet, forcing President Eisenhower to cancel a celebratory visit. Kishi, furious at this loss of face, deployed against them an anti-riot apparatus that included 18,000 policemen, aircraft, and a small army of ultranationalist vigilantes and yakuza thugs. Chalmers Johson, a leading scholar of the Japanese ‘miracle economy,’ has likened the suppresion of the AMPO protests to Hungary in 1956.

Abe’s view of his grandfather, and his style of governance, is that he belonged to "the minority of politicians willing to take an unpopular stand and stick to their convictions." Abe bears more than a passing resemblance to his grandfather: he recently backed a law requiring the teaching of patriotism in schools, and staunchly denies Japanese war-crimes like the use of forced labour and comfort women. Above all he wants to amend the pacifist Constitution to expand Japan’s military (expenditure on Japan’s ‘self-defense forces’ is already more than double India’s military expenditure). In this sense, he is bent on hammering nails into the coffin that his grandfather built for pacifist, non-chauvinist Japan - whether it be "unpopular" or not.

In the light of history, Japan’s democratic tradition looks a bit thin and, once Mr Kishi’s legacy has been invoked, its overtures to India sound less like the high-minded communion of democracies than the back-slapping of geopolitical allies. There is little doubt that Mr Abe will express his support for the enhancement of India’s civilian nuclear capacity, rarely forthcoming from nuke-phobic Japan, and will point the way further down a route that leads from India’s membership in the quadrilateral security initiative to the 123 Agreement and onwards to an "arc of freedom" and a more full-fledged Indian commitment to the Pax Americana.

Abe’s recollection of Kishi’s visit should not lull anyone into a day-dream of democratic camaraderie; on the contrary, it warns us to remain alert to the day that strategic realignments become at odds with the public’s aspirations to a particular international profile. On that day, a government may trample over its own people and tread on its own sovereignty in order to reach across the ocean and make the compromising handshake with a foreign power. That thought should make the UPA uncomfortable: fairly or not, it is what they're being accused of today. The ghost of Mr Kishi does not haunt the Diet but the hangars of the US Air Base in Okinawa, where nuclear weapons slept during his watch.