NEW DELHI: Signaling their growing alarm, senior Japanese officials gave a classified briefing to Indian and US officials on the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands earlier this week. China and Japan are locked in a territorial dispute over these islands in the East China Sea that has recently escalated to the level that has rung alarm bells among strategists.

This was part of the third trilateral meeting among India, Japan and the US, where the three countries explored possibilities of working together in the region. The trilateral has attracted criticism from China, which has blamed Tokyo for spreading its anxieties about Beijing's rise among other countries.

The trilateral, the third in the past one year, has now evolved into a deeper interaction where the three major nations exchange their strategic perceptions of the region. In the past months, India, Japan and the US have been working together to develop trade and economic linkages in south-east Asia. Myanmar also plays a key role as all three countries have reformed their ties with the junta-ruled nation.

India has proposed an east-west corridor connecting India via Myanmar with Thailand and further all the way to Vietnam. India, Myanmar and Thailand are already working on a trilateral highway that aims to provide connectivity and improve economic linkages among the countries of this region, and the trilateral effort will only augment this. At a deeper level, this aims to give countries on this corridor an alternative to the north-south connectivity provided by China's massively funded outreach to the region.

While a lot will depend on India's growing presence in Myanmar, it will be the redirection of Japan's overseas development assistance (ODA) programme that will actually fund these ventures, with the US providing the strategic heft to see this through. In past decades, Japan had used ODA to its advantage, but in recent years, Japanese assistance has dwindled, and in many countries this has been overtaken by China's humongous overseas enterprise. Japan, whose ODA is currently overwhelmingly directed to India and also Vietnam, is returning to its cheque book diplomacy as it attempts to regain influence in a China-dominated region.

As India, Japan and the US engage more intensively in the Asia-Pacific, they are bound to come up against a more assertive China which will take exception to what it sees as an attempt to corral it in the region by these three countries. India has asserted that it has interests in the Asia-Pacific, a fact that was mentioned in a joint statement with the Chinese defence minister during his recent visit to India. For the US, this is part of their much publicized "pivot" to Asia.

The three countries are also looking at joining forces for economic development projects in Afghanistan, which is of strategic importance to both India and the US, while Japan may remain one of the largest donors in the post-2014 environment. India and the US are pooling their strengths in a trilateral format with Afghanistan to ensure it doesn't descend into chaos again.

Also, they will have to try harder to assuage sensitivities of China, which is crying foul. The Chinese foreign ministry issued a veiled caution by saying it hoped "relevant countries will make more effort to promote regional peace, stability and development". Spokesperson Hong Lei was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency, "It is in the interests of all countries in the region."

The more aggressive Global Times, widely believed to reflect the views of a nationalistic Communist Party of China (CPC), said in an editorial, "Japan is causing problems for China, but it is not the country's foremost worry". "China has some hopes of carrying out strategic cooperation with India. If Asia falls into chaos because of how to deal with China, the result will be good for nobody," it added.

However, China too has recently stepped up its own activities. This week, China's official agency stated that Beijing had "chased" away Japanese vessels from the contested islands in the East China Sea, asserting it's "management" of the islands. In the South China Sea, where it is fighting for sovereignty of the Spratlys and Paracel islands with Vietnam and the Philippines, China has increased construction work in the newly-created Sansha city, which was elevated to a prefecture in July.

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Islands’ tiff: Japan briefs India