Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Iran as prime minister in 2001 and then Iranian president Mohammad Khatami paid a return visit in 2003. At that time, hardly anyone would have suspected that the two sides would fail to exchange state visits in the following decade.
Between 2003 and 2016, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad briefly visited India in 2008, while Manmohan Singh attended the 2012 NAM Summit in Tehran.
However, this is not the first time that the two sides have waited so long to return state visits. Mohammad Reza Shah visited India in 1978 after a gap of 21 years, whereas in 1993, Narasimha Rao was first the prime minister to have visited Iran in 16 years.
Both in the 1980s and the last decade, India allowed the bilateral relationship to drift due to third countries. As a result ancient bonds and natural economic and strategic complementarities failed to translate into a robust bilateral relationship. Will Narendra Modi’s belated visit revitalise the relationship?
Modi was expected in Tehran in late 2015, after India signed an MoU to develop the Chabahar port in May. He met with President Hassan Rouhani at Ufa in July. Yet, Modi waited for almost a year. In the meantime, President Pranab Mukherjee visited Israel, Jordan, and Palestine and Vice-President Hamid Ansari visited Turkmenistan. Modi travelled to all the five Central Asia Republics and Afghanistan.
In each of these landlocked countries, the prime minister referred to the possibilities that would be unlocked by the development of Iran’s Chabahar port. He also travelled to the UAE and Saudi Arabia and attended the G-20 Summit in Turkey and is likely to visit Qatar, Afghanistan, Israel, Turkey, and, possibly, Pakistan later this year. So, Modi has already visited all the major neighbours of Iran, except Iraq, and by the end of this year, he would have visited three of Iran’s neighbours twice in less than a year.
While the prime minister was crisscrossing Iran’s neighbourhood, India’s petroleum, transport, and foreign minis-tries engaged their Iranian counterparts to discuss contentious issues such as the unexpected involvement of a private Iranian firm in the Chabahar project, conditions for the return of gas fields abandoned by Indian companies during the sanctions regime, price of gas, identification of banking channels for payment of oil dues, and access to Afghan-istan and Central Asia. In the midst of these multi-faceted negotiations, both sides feigned indifference towards the outcome, even as they raised the stakes.Iran repeatedly complained against tardy progress and even declared that the deadline for India to start work on projects was over and hinted that it was looking for other partners. However, it maintained regular contact, released nine Indians jailed for allegedly smuggling oil, and, most recently, derisively rejected Pakistan’s charge that India was misusing its territory to launch subversive activities in Baluchistan.
Likewise, in the middle of negotiations, India hinted that it was evaluating proposals for gas supply from other countries. Petronet LNG indeed managed to nudge Qatar’s RasGas to halve the gas price and waive a massive contractual penalty. The UAE offered to store its crude oil in India’s strategic storage facilities, with two thirds of the oil to be supplied free (In addition, the Gulf countries have also shown interest in joint exploration and production in the energy sector and investment in India’s infrastructure sector.) However, India also ratcheted up its potential investment commitment to Iranian projects and relaxed visa norms for Iranians.
While remaining engaged with Tehran, the government did not restrict its relationship with Iran’s rivals because even in the best case scenario, Iran’s energy sector needs a few years to achieve its full potential and, in any case, Iran alone cannot satisfy India’s energy requirements. On the other hand, the importance of the Gulf countries as sources of energy supplies, destinations for Indian exports and expatriate workforce, and partners against terrorism and, sporadically, even Pakistan, is unlikely to diminish anytime soon. Likewise, in the near future, Israel will remain indispensable to India’s defence preparedness.
Strategic delay
In retrospect, one could argue that the “delay” in engaging at the highest level was judiciously used by the government to build its bargaining power vis-à-vis Iran by improving relations with Iran’s competitors and also to signal to Iran that New Delhi does not view its relationship with countries in West Asia in zero-sum terms. In fact, the prospect of revival of ties with Iran (along with India’s emergence as a major energy importer) added to India’s bargaining power in the region and helped in improving relations with the Gulf countries and Afghanistan.
When Modi landed in Tehran, his hosts knew that Afghanistan had swung back toward India after a brief ill-advised romance with Pakistan and that India had struck favourable deals with Iran’s energy market competitors. Modi visited a Gurdwara in Tehran, met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani and presented them with reproductions of rare Islamic and Persian manuscripts, released a rare manuscript of Kalileh-wa-Dimneh – the Persian avatar of Panchatantra – and witnessed the signing of a number of bilateral agreements.
The signing of the bilateral agreement with Iran on the development of Chabahar port and the construction of the Cha-bahar-Zahedan railway line and the trilateral transport and transit agreement including Afghanistan was the most important achievement of the visit. The port can reduce the dependence of Central Asian Republics upon China and Russia and Afghanistan’s dependence upon Pakistan by providing these landlocked countries with an alternative access to sea.
Chabahar will also help Iran decongest Bandar Abbas port and develop the economically backward Sistan-Baluchestan province while helping India secure access to Central Asian and Iranian markets as well as energy supplies. The economic and strategic interests of India and Iran converge in Chabahar and it could provide a stable foundation for their relationship.
(The writer teaches at the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)