Post-US intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, India-Iran relations always had – as Princess Diana once famously said about her marriage, “Three of us in it”; the third being the US.
Prior to that, strategic convergence between India and Iran grew from the mid-1990s, driven by common objectives in Afghanistan and the shared threat from Taliban and its sponsor Pakistan. This was exacerbated after the capture of Kabul by Taliban in 1996 when only the Northern Alliance stood in its way of overrunning all of Afghanistan.
In 2001, then prime minister A.B. Vajpayee visited Teheran and was hosted by reformist and then ascendant Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. The resulting Teheran Declaration reflected the growing engagement.
The Iranian president returned the visit in 2003 and was the chief guest at Republic Day. But by then, the Taliban had been deposed by the US and had found sanctuaries in Pakistan. US troops already controlled Afghanistan and would attack Iraq two months later.
From mid-2003, when the clandestine enrichment programme of Iran was revealed – including links to rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan – India-Iran relations began to sputter. Iran was being pilloried for its nuclear programme, for what it thought were activities allowed to it as signatory of the Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT). India, on the other hand, as a non-signatory was, according to Iraq, unfairly negotiating a nuclear deal with the US.
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The US had begun to interpose in India-Iran relations, and this still persists. From 2003 onwards, India-Iran bilateral relations began to feel the impact. The US pressured India to vote with them and against Iran at International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), curtail trade and oil purchases from Iran and comply with US sanctions.
India maintained it would only comply with UN sanctions and not additional ones mandated by US laws. Iran turned its attention westwards and with patience and shrewdness through proxies it ensnared US militarily in a sectarianism and terrorism fed civil war in Iraq. From this militant brew arose the first al-Qaeda clone under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and then the ISIS hybrid under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
While president George W. Bush managed to push back and stabilise Iraq enough to get notional democratic processes going, his successor President Barack Obama first dithered and then chose to completely alter US approach to the region.
He calculated that the suddenly emergent ISIS, which created an Islamic Caliphate literally overnight across large swathes of territory in northern Iraq and Syria, could either be controlled by a third US war – for which US was unprepared – or the co-option of Iran.
He chose the latter and that led to the signing of the nuclear deal with Iran by P-5 and Germany.
With this entente with the Western nations, Iran began to slowly assert influence and then control via proxies all across West Asia, running through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean. While India-Iran relations regained some normalcy, the old warmth was missing as both nations had different strategic priorities. While Iran’s Quds Force, led by late major general Qasem Soleimani, shored up the beleaguered Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, with the Russians jumping in to provide air cover, the Hezbollah and Kurds pitched in with ground forces.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani shakes hands with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a photo opportunity ahead of their meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, February 17, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after assuming power in 2014, began a personal outreach to Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Even though these two nations were in open conflict with Iran in Yemen and via their surrogates in Syria India-Iran relations were insulated from it. This changed with the arrival of President Donald Trump in 2016. He reversed the Obama outreach to Iran, aligned openly with Saudi-Emirati alliance, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and literally armed the sanctions against Iran.
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Trump personalised his diplomacy to an extent that he broke past conventions by openly interfering in the elections of leaders he found likeable. He shifted the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation on the eve of Israeli elections to give a boost to beleaguered prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He repeatedly urged the British to go for Brexit and even support Boris Johnson against the incumbent Conservative prime minister of his own party. In India, he played a critical role, as his own tweet claimed, in getting a quick resolution to the Pulwama-Balakot near-war Indo-Pakistan confrontation, which an election-bound PM Modi fully used to his benefit.
Inherent in this was the likelihood that countries opposed to the US-Saudi-Emirati alliance in the region would start viewing India as partisan. This danger was enhanced by Modi government, after being swept into power again in 2019, by front-loading their ideological and sectarian agenda. Starting with amendments to Article 370 to Triple Talaq Bill and eventually the Citizenship Amendment Act, there was breathless pursuit of a to-do list of things, like all parties, in their election manifesto which are normally implementable after consensus building.
Even the BJP has been taken by surprise by the lack of electoral benefit from this agenda in a series of state elections, which they either lost or barely scraped through. Even more so, they fail to understand the damage it is doing to Indian image abroad and relations particularly with the Islamic nations.
Verbal spats with Turkey, Malaysia and even Indonesia were followed by Iran very strongly reminding India of its constitutional duties. Despite India remonstrating with the Iranian ambassador, Iran upped the ante with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who only intervenes in public when Iran is prepared for confrontation, urging India to “confront extremist Hindus & their parties & stop the massacre of Muslims in order to prevent India’s isolation from the world of Islam”.
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Iran seems to have decided to take the bull by the horns perhaps after cost-benefit analysis. India having largely succumbed to US sanctions, something India resisted since 2003 as India only recognised UN sanctions, there is little relief Iran perceives coming from India through trade and investment.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly personalised dalliance with the Saudi and Abu Dhabi crown princes and now with Trump at Motera stadium has been read as India siding with Iranian antagonists with visible enthusiasm. Iran calculates that India needs them more than the other way around as after the Taliban-US deal only they control the access to Afghanistan, other than Pakistan.
India will think twice before putting that in danger, unlike barring palm oil imports from Malaysia. Thus, traditional Indian ability to play all sides in a region riven by fault-lines and animosities now stands degraded.
Will the BJP live in denial or adapt its domestic agenda? Only time will tell.
K.C. Singh is a retired Indian civil servant and was the Indian ambassador to Iran.