Jaishankar’s visit to Iran and playing the long game

Notwithstanding his better-known persona as a diplomat, Jaishankar undertakes political initiatives of significance.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s visit to Tehran on January 14-15 has much more to it than meets the eye. The shades of grey inlaid in the visit have been obfuscated further by the Iranian missile strikes on Pakistan a day after Jaishankar returned to New Delhi.

There is no evidence so far to suggest that there was any connection between the Jaishankar’s visit and Iran’s decision to strike inside Pakistan. Within India, however, public attention in the coming days will be on the escalating tensions between Iran and Pakistan after the latter retaliated on January 18 with rockets and drones.

Unless these tensions develop into an all-out war in the region, the focus will return before the Lok Sabha elections to Jaishankar’s presence in Tehran.

In Kashmir’s Budgam district, hoardings of Ayatollah Khomeini in impressive poses have the pride of place three and a half decades after the death of the Supreme Leader of Iran’s Shia-majority Islamic Republic. Shia Muslims are estimated to constitute 35 per cent of Budgam district’s entire population. They are 85 per cent of Budgam city, the district headquarters. With speculation about assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, Shia votes in constituencies in Budgam district will be decisive.

In 2019, Farooq Abdullah carried the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat, of which Budgam was a part. Srinagar is the most prestigious Lok Sabha seat in the Union Territory. Overall, Shias make up more than a quarter of Kashmir’s population. It is a safe bet that posters showing Jaishankar with Iran’s President, Seyyed Ibrahim Raisi — a household name in Shia pockets in Kashmir — will appear before the elections.

In polls where a few thousand votes can put a candidate past the winning post, Shia voters are important in several Lok Sabha constituencies such as Lucknow, Hyderabad, Murshidabad, and Bhopal. Lucknow, most of all, where Shias have overwhelmingly voted for Atal Bihari Vajpayee in five Lok Sabha elections and for Rajnath Singh in the last two. 

A year before the 1996 Lok Sabha poll, then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao contrived a visit by then Iranian President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to Lucknow. Iran’s leader addressed a huge crowd of Shias at Lucknow’s Bada Imambara, where he praised India’s secularism.

Jaishankar’s outreach to the world’s Shia political and supra-national fountainhead came only days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government’s outreach to the most India-friendly state in the Islamic Ummah: the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE President, went on a roadshow with Prime Minister Narendra Modi through the streets of Ahmedabad, a highlight of the President’s visit to Gujarat on January 9-10. Thousands of Muslims, especially Dawoodi Bohras in their distinguishing caps, lined up on Ahmedabad’s streets to cheer the roadshow.

Never before in Gujarat — perhaps not anywhere in India — had so many Muslims gathered to wave to Modi since he entered electoral politics. It was a turning point because no Head of State or Government from an Islamic country — i.e. where Islam is the State religion — had visited Gujarat during the nearly 13 years when Modi was the Chief Minister or even after he became Prime Minister. Sheikh Mohamed’s visit represented the first Summit-level political engagement between an Islamic state and Gujarat since the milestone year of 2002. 

Notwithstanding his better-known persona as a diplomat, Jaishankar undertakes political initiatives of long-term significance. His visit to Paderu in Andhra Pradesh in June 2022 was one such. “Delighted to visit Paderu, the sacred place of the legendary revolutionary freedom fighter Alluri Sitarama Raju,” Jaishankar wrote in Facebook after his visit. The trip paved the way for Modi’s visit to the newly-created district named after Raju, and the elevation of the freedom fighter to iconic status with reverberations beyond Andhra Pradesh, in Telangana, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh. The blockbuster film, RRR, was created around the lives of Raju and another revolutionary, Komaram Bheem.

All this is not to say that the minister’s Tehran visit was devoid of diplomatic content. Terrorism figured prominently in Jaishankar’s discussions with all his interlocutors. On January 3, in the second worst terrorist attack in the Islamic Republic’s history, over 94 people were killed and almost 300 were injured. The threats to sea lanes in the Indian Ocean from Houthis in Yemen were an important item of discussion.

India-Iran ties have acquired a new dimension after Tehran joined the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) group on January 1. Jaishankar and his Iranian counterpart will again meet in Kampala this week at the Non-Aligned Summit, both sides agreed. It will be an occasion to discuss the Iran-Pakistan confrontation.

(KP Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.