Fresh from the triumph of his African dollar diplomacy, China's President Hu Jintao arrives in New Delhi on 20 November 2006. In the three weeks that follow, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lands in Tokyo, where the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will unfold his vision of a "New Asian Order" that pointedly excludes China.

While Hu's visit to India will mark the culmination of the designated China-India Friendship Year, Abe's is a flattering invitation to feast at the high table of democracy with Japan, the United States and Australia in what the Japanese Prime Minister calls a quadrilateral strategic dialogue. Not a whisper any longer of the India-Japan-China trilateral strategic cooperation plan earlier mooted by Japan's ambassador in New Delhi, Yasukuni Enoki.

Even before taking office, Abe remarked in his book, Utsukushi Kunihe (Towards a Beautiful Country), that "it will not be surprising if in another 10 years, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-US and Japan-China relations." India has already replaced China as the largest recipient of Japanese aid. Abe thinks "it is of crucial importance to Japan's national interest that we will further strengthen our ties with India." An Indian columnist calls him an Indophile. So was his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who visited India within months of becoming prime minister in 1957, though his hopes of a robust economic partnership foundered on the rocks of India's socialism and bureaucracy.

India has hoary cultural ties with both East Asian giants. But India and China fought a brief bitter war in the Himalayas in 1962 and are still locked in an unresolved territorial dispute. In contrast, Japan has always aroused admiration for beating the West at the modernisation game.

Nevertheless, seeing itself as a player rather than camp follower, India baulks at becoming entangled in East Asian power politics. An Asian quadrangle with two Caucasian members also goes against the grain of Indian nationalism. Singh has clarified that India will take no part in strategies to contain China. Travelling to Beijing and Tokyo in June 2006, Pranab Mukherjee, now India's external affairs minister but then holding the defence portfolio, countered Japanese expressions of concern about China's spiralling military spending and lack of transparency with the retort that China's army has always been huge.

There are powerful reasons why "India and China should cooperate and compete with each other", as Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew told a New Delhi audience last November. Sino-Indian trade has grown spectacularly to $17.6 billion (nudging the $26.8 billion Indo-US trade), while Indo-Japanese trade languishes at only $6.5 billion.

Scope for cooperation in information technology seems limitless. But man does not live by bread alone: Lee's advice not to be "paranoid and suspicious" of China is more problematic for Indians who see China in terms of Churchill's description of the Soviet Union as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

Even Singh's communist allies are not vocal in defending a country whose missiles reportedly target India from Tibet. Mukherjee's harping during his Asian tour on the old cliche of the Indian Ocean as a zone of peace obliquely referred to China's maritime installations in the Cocos Island (leased from Myanmar) and Pakistan's Gwadar port, built by China. India fears being caught in a pincer movement. China's serious image problem is compounded by its military/nuclear links with Pakistan which are seen as a ploy to tie rising India down in a sub-continental wrangle. The seven days Hu will spend in Pakistan during his South Asian jaunt (against four in India) have revived suspicions on this score.

Strong commercial interaction, likely to be further reinforced now that India has opened the 14,000-ft Nathu-la pass into Tibet, has not made for a convergence of global strategic interests. Regionally, China is believed to have resisted India's entry into the East Asia Summit and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Its observer status in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, courtesy of Bangladesh and Pakistan, prompted India to act on Japan's 10-year-old application. Former Defence Minister George Fernandes' famous comment that the Middle Kingdom remains India's "potential enemy number one" has never been forgotten.

It rankles that the Chinese still occupy the Aksai Chin plateau in the northwest and claim Arunachal Pradesh state in the northeast while enjoying Pakistan's gift of a slice of Kashmir territory that was not hers to give. While a return of territory may not be feasible, Indian commentators have suggested that if Japan should apologise for wartime atrocities, China should also apologise for invading India in 1962.

Reflecting these anxieties, India recently raised the level of diplomatic representation at the exiled Dalai Lama's headquarters, imposed stricter security restrictions on Chinese investors and excluded them from airports, seaports and sensitive sectors of the telecom and IT industries. The 12 agreements on matters like student exchanges, investment protection and regional trade promised for Hu's visit will not end a wariness that can inhibit the economic cooperation both countries seek. That demands a dramatic announcement by Hu going beyond Singh's agreement last year with Premier Wen Jiabao on the "political parameters and guiding principles" of a territorial settlement to take bold and imaginative measures to solve the border problem once and for all.

No one wants India to jump into bed with Japan and its two Western partners. But Abe's invitation will be very much on Hu's mind when he reaches India. Singh is being urged not to let his guest imagine that the "New Asian Order" has been shelved. Diplomacy lies in choices and options, not certainties and lost opportunities.