GUEST COLUMN: Rouhani visit can impart much needed traction

Iran President Hassan Rouhani  will meet with PM Narendra Modi in Delhi on Saturday and the texture of this important bilateral relationship is reflected in the fact that this visit comes  ten years after  that of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in 2008.   Despite their geographical proximity, the world’s largest democracy and biggest theocracy remain relatively distant.

The Rouhani visit seeks to bridge this gap and impart greater content to the relationship and a wide spectrum of political, strategic, trade, energy and connectivity issues will be on the agenda. In all likelihood, the Chabahar port where India has a significant stake will be a high  priority. 

India’s  bilateral  relationship with the post Islamic revolution Iran has been uneasy over a number of issues that include Kashmir and the concern expressed by Tehran over the status of  its minorities (read Muslim citizens) in India during the Narasimha Rao years. However, over the last 15 years, the single most constraining factor in the bilateral has been the US sanctions on Iran over the latter’s nuclear programme.

India had voted against Iran at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) in November 2009 and this rankled Tehran at the time, though it merits recall that there was unanimity among the  five UN Security Council permanent  members, including Russia and China on quarantining Tehran's nuclear ambitions. 

US-led sanctions against Iran further reduced the diplomatic and trade/investment space for Delhi in enhancing bi-lateral ties with Iran, though the situation  has improved some extent after the nuclear rapprochement arrived at, by the P5+1 nations, in July 2015 during the Obama presidency. For the record, US President Donlad Trump has often threatened to reverse the American stand and bring Iran back under the sanctions scanner.

Earlier speaking in Hyderabad on Friday, where the Rouhani visit began, the Iranian President spoke very positively about the complementary strands in the rather dormant relationship that can be shaped into an abiding win-win arrangement. These include the hydrocarbon sector, widening the trade bandwidth and in strengthening cultural ties and people-to-people contact.

It merits recall that till India acquired independence in 1947, Persian was widely spoken and taught in the sub-continent and was the preferred court language. Some parts of India still have old land records documented in the Persian script. 

India’s diversity was noted by President Rouhani in Hyderabad, where he referred to India as a "living museum", where different religions and ethnicities lived in harmony. Tehran  is also aware that the largest Shia population outside of Iran in the world lives in India and that they are not subjected to the sectarian discrimination that is rampant in most of the Sunni-dominated Muslim world.

India has to navigate its bilateral with Iran against the backdrop of the tenacious US/Israel-Iran discord on one hand, and the deep Saudi Arabia-Iran tension on the other. To its credit, the Foreign Office in Delhi has managed this contradictory and prickly trapeze with quiet competence. The Netenyahu visit to India and the Modi visit to the Gulf nations, as also Palestine over the last two months is testimony to this adroit political  tight-rope walking.

One sector that will engage the two sides is the modest trade relationship. India has a $2.4 trillion economy and Iran is just under half a billion dollars. Together they are almost $3 trillion; yet their bilateral trade, including all sectors, is under $15 billion. Of this the hydrocarbon sector accounts for almost 75 per cent and the challenge will be to widen the spectrum of trade to include pharma, medium and small scale enterprises (MSME)  and IT services and to enhance the long-term hydrocarbon agreements with special emphasis on natural gas.

The connectivity accorded by a speedy completion of Chabahar will accord certain strategic space to India in circumventing the transport blockage imposed by Pakistan and accessing both Afghanistan and central Asia. However, it would be erroneous to infer that this port access will be similar to what China has acquired in Gwadar.

The potential to impart much greater content to the India-Iran bilateral relationship is considerable and the Rouhani visit will hopefully impart the high-level political direction and traction that this under-realised relationship warrants.

Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the publication