How to deal with Pakistan: New Delhi must pursue a flexible strategy with elements of containment and engagement

After the two back-to-back attacks in Gurdaspur and Udhampur, choices before India are stark: Carry on as before, launch tit-for-tat strikes, or turn our backs on Pakistan. After tentatively exploring options two and three for the past year, the Modi government has adopted the first course.
There is nothing dishonourable about this approach which essentially calls on India to field everything that Pakistan throws at us, and yet continue the policy of engagement with a view to reducing the space for hardliners.
Governments since Rajiv Gandhi have followed this track. Recall that Atal Bihari Vajpayee swallowed the bile of the Kargil betrayal and reached out to its planner – Pervez Musharraf – to arrive at a fairly successful agreement which has dramatically reduced violence in Jammu & Kashmir. Looked at in the perspective of 30 years, India is the one that has emerged stronger even as Pakistan is tottering on the brink.
Sure, we could get some psychological satisfaction in bombing the terror camps and sending the Pakistan high commissioner packing. Both options would a ctually please the Pakistani deep state which wants to have nothing to do with us, and would welcome a conflict that derails India from its path of economic growth.
It is not too difficult to see the hand of these elements in the attacks which are taking place even as the two countries are planning a meeting between their top security officials ‘to discuss all issues connected to terrorism’ and expedite the Mumbai case trial.
In September 2013, a couple of days ahead of the Manmohan Singh-Nawaz Sharif meeting in New York, militants dressed in army fatigues struck in Hiranagar near Kathua killing several policemen, army personnel and civilians before being gunned down. In November 2014, just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was meeting his Pakistani counterpart at Dhulikhel, Nepal, four gunmen struck an army camp in the Arnia sector of Jammu leaving three army men and five civilians dead before being killed.
The attack in Gurdaspur and now the one on the Udhampur-Srinagar section of National Highway 1A are a bit out of the usual grid which, in the past five years, has seen attacks by militants wearing army fatigues on army and police camps on either side of the highway connecting Jammu and Pathankot. But there are still dots that need to be connected as to why Gurdaspur was the chosen target or why the captured militant Naved made his way with his companion all the way from Kupwara in the north, across the Valley and over the Pir Panjal, to launch an attack on a BSF bus near Udhampur.
Whether the authorities learn anything from Naved is moot. He is the lowest part of the Pakistani deep state food chain – the cannon fodder. Those comparing him to Kasab are overstating the case. The 26/11 attacker was also cannon fodder, but part of a complex high-impact conspiracy. Naved appears to be playing a role in a set of low-level operations which have been taking place for years in the areas across the international border in Jammu.
Fortunately, not everything is bleak on the India-Pakistan front. For one thing, the Modi government seems to have bitten the bullet and is determined to press on with the National Security Advisers’ level meeting later this month.
Then, on Monday Tariq Khosa, the former Director General of Pakistan’s Federal Investigating Agency, published an oped in the Dawn newspaper giving the gist of his erstwhile agency’s investigation into the Pakistan-end conspiracy relating to the Mumbai attack of 2008.
Essentially, Khosa acknowledged that Kasab was a Pakistani national, that he and his fellow militants were trained at the Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp in Thatta, Sind, and launched from there, that his agency had recovered the trawler which was used to hijack the Indian trawler, the ops room for the attack was located, the VOIP communications unearthed and the commander, his deputies and financiers arrested and brought to trial.
There is no new revelation here, but what is noteworthy is Khosa’s former rank as DG FIA. He could have written the article any time after he retired after 2011, but that he has written it now is as significant as the fact that Dawn published it.
The first part of Khosa’s article gives a hint of the churning that is taking place in Pakistan since the December 2014 attack by the Tehreek-e-Taliban on a school leading to the deaths of 145 persons, including 132 school children. As he puts it, “I have no doubt that the political and security leadership [of Pakistan] have resolved to eliminate the scourge of terrorism, militancy and extremism.”
This may well be true, or it may not. Only time can tell. However, for any government in New Delhi the challenge is in crafting an effective response to Pakistan. Over the years, governments have triangulated their options and realised that the only sustainable one is a strategy that combines containment and engagement.
This involves a policy where the country continues to harden its capabilities to counter terrorists, even as it seeks to smother the domestic base of terrorism in Pakistan through a policy of engagement with those elements who have realised that their country must get out of the suicidal path it has been on.
Times of India August 7, 2015

The IS threat: India isn't on the front line

In recent times we have been hearing a great deal about the Islamic State (IS) and how it poses a threat to India. In July, the newspaper USA Today carried a report claiming that the IS was contemplating raising a terrorist army in Pakistan and Afghanistan and launching an attack on India which would trigger off the “end of times” war promised in Islamic theology. This was based on a document written in Urdu, captured from a Pakistani national close to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

According to specialist Jessica Stern, the document is more of a wish list of the IS, and does not reflect its actual capabilities in the South Asian region. The idea of an “end of times” conflict has pre-dated the IS in this region with many of those involved in fighting with the Taliban believing that they were part of a struggle which would see the Armageddon-like battle in the region of Khorasan (approximating north-eastern Iran and northerrn Afghanistan) which would result in the entire world coming under the sway of the sway of the Mahdi.

With groups like the Taliban afloat in Afghanistan, such millenarian thinking is not unusual. It also sometimes reflects the semi-educated Maulvis who dot the landscape of South Asia. But from here to extrapolate some imminent danger to India from the Islamic State is a leap too far. However, it clearly seems to be worrying the authorities in the Union Home Ministry, who called a meeting last month of 12 state government officials to frame a strategy against the IS threat. According to a newspaper report, the meeting took up the issue of a new de-radicalisaion strategy which would use moderate Muslim clergy to create a “counter-narrative” to challenge the jihadi ideologies while at the same time the intelligence authorities would maintain a surveillance of cyber space, the recruitment ground of the IS.

As of now, no one is clear as to how many Indian Muslims have been recruited by the IS. Government estimates put it at about a dozen. But so far they have managed to lay their hands on only one returnee Areeb Majeed one of four Kalyan men who returned from Syria earlier this year. Considering that India has a Muslim population of 180 million, these numbers are statistically equal to zero.

We also need to take into account another factor. For the present, the IS orientation is towards the Arab world. Unlike the Al Qaeda, which was a global franchise, the IS is a proto-state with a specific geographical location. And, as of now, it is far from India. It is a big problem for many developed countries because they worry that their young men who are flocking to the standard of the IS will return and form the core of a new generation of hardened, violent Islamist extremists. Again, Indian Muslims, like many other Indians are poor and cannot afford to simply fly off to Turkey or Iraq and join the IS. Further, in the case of India, the IS’ vaunted ability to radicalise people through the internet is limited because our internet coverage is woeful, being virtually non-existent for the poorer people.

There is, of course, the danger that exists of the IS taking root in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both countries are already awash with jihadi ideologies. Further, the revelation of the death of Mullah Omar and the possibility that the Taliban will fragment, leaves an opening for individual Taliban leaders, some of who have already announced a shift of loyalty to the IS. In Pakistan, the army offensive against the TTP can also have the consequence of fragmenting the outfit and leaving a vacuum that can be filled by mullahs aligning themselves with the IS. In either case, that battle will have to be fought on the ground there. India is not on that front line. Recall the many alleged intelligence alerts claiming that the Al Qaeda was entering the battle in India. Nothing came of them.

What the Union Home Ministry needs to worry about are the growing instances of communal violence in the country in the past year. They need not concern themselves over the Islamic narrative in India which, in any case, has produced a remarkable quiescent Muslim community in an era of turmoil in the Islamic world. Hindutva outfits have stepped up their pressure on the Muslim community and we are likely to see more violence in the run up to the state Assembly elections in UP in 2017. This is bad news, because at the root of radicalisation is usually a sense of grievance. While in many instances, grievances are manufactured, in the case of India, some people are bent on creating them through a strategy of overawing the Muslim community through a policy of violence and discrimination. But, the policy is more likely to end up tearing the social and religious fabric of the country apart, the surest way of mortally damaging the unity and integrity of the nation.

Mid Day August 4, 2015

In recent times we have been hearing a great deal about the Islamic State (IS) and how it poses a threat to India. In July, the newspaper USA Today carried a report claiming that the IS was contemplating raising a terrorist army in Pakistan and Afghanistan and launching an attack on India which would trigger off the “end of times” war promised in Islamic theology. This was based on a document written in Urdu, captured from a Pakistani national close to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). - See more at: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/the-is-threat-india-isnt-on-the-front-line/16424192#sthash.lawr6j09.dpuf

Go slow on the Kabul Express

The Great Game appears to have taken a couple of somersaults in Afghanistan. The announcement of Mullah Omar’s death, apparently two years ago in April 2013, is a pointer towards this. 

The most obvious consequence of this will be the weakening of the Taliban. Omar was no ordinary leader. He was the Amir-ul-Momineen, or the commander of the faithful, and accepted as such by the various factions of the Taliban camp, the Haqqani network and al Qaeda. 

 

His successor Mullah Akhtar Mansoor is being opposed by powerful Taliban dissidents, and even if accepted, will simply be the leader of the Taliban, not the near-mythical Amir-ul-Momineen. 

The Nato war against the Taliban has removed a number of older field commanders from the scene and seen the rise of younger, more radicalised fighters who are outside Islamabad’s control. 

Almost simultaneously, there has been an announcement that the legendary Jalaluddin Haqqani, too, has passed away. He was the key ISI-backed player in Afghanistan responsible for many of the terrorist strikes, including the attacks on the Indian Embassy and other India-related facilities, that took place in that country. 

Omar's death 

The news of Mullah Omar’s death was communicated by Pakistan to Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani, indicating that Islamabad no longer felt the necessity of having Omar being seen as a unifying factor of the Taliban. 

Minus the Amir-ul-Momineen, the ISI will find it easier to handle the factious Taliban. At some point or the other, Omar would have to be produced to bless the peace agreement. Revealing his death now, Pakistan has, on one hand, weakened the Taliban, and, on the other, bought brownie points with the United States and China. 

Clearly, Islamabad has retrenched its aims in Afghanistan, instead of seeking to replace the Kabul government with the Taliban, who have always been more than a handful, it is now seeking to work with Ghani - who is following a policy of working closely with the Pakistan government and who has gone out of his way to signal that Kabul will accommodate Islamabad’s concerns. 

Recall that in May, the spy agencies of the two countries signed an MoU to share information and boost anti-terror cooperation. The peace process which is being ‘facilitated’ by Pakistan involves China, the US, Afghanistan and the Taliban and is called the 2+2+1 talks. 

On July 7, the first round of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban officials took place in Murree, in the presence of the authorised representatives of the Chinese and the US governments. 

On Eid, in mid-July, a written message, purportedly from Mullah Omar declared that there was nothing wrong in talking with adversaries and had welcomed “political endeavours and peaceful pathways”. 

Further, he rejected the claim that the Taliban were Pakistan’s agents. 

In response, Ghani had expressed his gratitude to the Amir-ul-Momineen and declared that negotiations with the Taliban were the only way to end the bloodshed and bring peace to Afghanistan. You can be sure, in hindsight, that the message was crafted by the ISI. 

Now, with things moving its way, Pakistan now appears to be distancing itself from the Taliban. This is essential for getting the support of the US and China in the venture which will give it what it most desires - an Afghanistan fitting into its sphere of influence. 

Talks postponed 

Omar’s death has led to the postponement of the second round of talks that were scheduled to take place in Murree on Friday. 

A dissident group of Taliban leaders has emerged to challenge the ‘election’ of Mansoor as the successor to Omar. It has constituted its own shura, or council, and is threatening to elect its own leader. 

Omar’s family, too, has declined to back Mansoor and have called for a consensual election based on consultation among the ulema, the Taliban, and elders. This is simply not going to happen. 

India out on a limb 

Where does all this leave India? Between a rock and a hard place. New Delhi cannot avoid one essential truth - that its substantial commitments to the civilian reconstruction of Afghanistan have been based on the security cover provided by the US/Nato forces. 

With the US deciding to go along with the Pakistan- China option, India is out on a limb. True, we have friends in Afghanistan - the supporters of former President Hamid Karzai, the left-inclined intellectuals, parts of the Northern Alliance who fought the Taliban and Pakistan. 

But as of now, with Islamabad having been placed in the driver’s seat by the US and China, they are marginalised. 

It is time for New Delhi to roll with the punches and bide its time. India lacks resources and direct access to Afghanistan, but it can derive some comfort from the fact that, if the past is any guide, you can always trust Islamabad to give us the opening through its propensity to overreach. 

Mail Today August 3, 2015

Why Yakub Memon should not be hanged

Don’t get me wrong on this, I support the death penalty – for rapist-murderers, child killers, terrorists and even acid-throwers. But I go with our Supreme Court’s caveat, that it should be reserved for the “rarest of rare” cases. Yakub Memon, who could be executed on July 30^th for his role in the Bombay blasts of 1993 does not fit that criterion.
Punishment in a civilised democracy must  balance between retribution on behalf of the victim and the possibility of the rehabilitation of the criminal. And, of course, it must meet the requirement of proportionality, in other words, the punishment must fit the crime.
In my view, Yakub Memon was a second-level  actor in the conspiracy and not deserving of what is called the “supreme” punishment. The main conspirators are Dawood Ibrahim, his brother Anees, Yakub’s elder brother Mushtaq “Tiger” Memon and the unknown ISI officers who helped them to stage the horrific Bombay blasts of 1993 that took the lives of 257 people. All of them are hiding in Pakistan. There were also others, such as the ten small-time hoods who actually planted the bombs, others who were involved in landing the RDX explosives and storing them at various locations in Mumbai.
Yakub is not innocent. He was aware of the conspiracy and even aided it, but he was not the main player. More important was his behaviour subsequent to his escape from India and his role in exposing the Pakistani hand in the blasts.

Yakub’s return
Just before the blasts on March 12, 1993, the Memon family slipped out of Mumbai on a flight to Dubai via Karachi. During the Karachi stopover, they slipped out and entered Pakistan without any immigration formalities. As the heat built up, they were whisked away to Bangkok and brought back to Pakistan after a few days, traveling on Pakistani passports with new identities.  Nearly 17 months after they fled, in  August 1994, Yakub was dramatically arrested in New Delhi along with six members of his family, which included three women. However, Tiger and another brother, Ayub, remained in Pakistan.
The government hailed it as a big catch. Before the magistrate who remanded him, Yakub said that he had returned of his own volition to surrender before the Indian authorities. The police, however, showed him as being arrested at New Delhi railway station and the media was told that he had been sent on a clandestine mission to trigger blasts on Independence Day. Privately, police sources acknowledged that Yakub had been “arrested” in Kathmandu. In reality, he and his family were pushed across the border on July 28 and interrogated by the Intelligence Bureau. Thereafter on August 5 he was taken to New Delhi railway station and formally arrested.

Helping nail Pakistani role
The value of Yakub in proving Pakistan’s complicity in the Bombay blasts was invaluable. Subsequently, Yakub persuaded six other members of his family to return and face the law – his brothers Essa and Suleiman and his wife Rubina, his own wife Raheen and his mother Hanifa  and father Abdul Razzak.
Between March 12, 1993, and Yakub’s return, Pakistan played a cat and mouse game with India, first denying the presence of the Memons in Karachi, then acknowledging it when evidence was provided. But they claimed that the Memons, who had no visas for Pakistan, had left for places unknown.
Yakub provided the Indian authorities with knowledge of the Pakistani officials who assisted the family in Dubai and Karachi, as well as details about the Pakistani passports and other identity documents issued to them by the Pakistanis, thus nailing Islamabad’s lies. He also had a few micro-cassettes of conversations of Tiger and his associates that he had taped surreptitiously in Dubai and a few other items of proof.
The information he provided played an important role in the trial of the accused but instead of being treated as an approver of sorts, he became a fall guy. Since the authorities did not have Tiger in their hands, they wanted another Memon to hang.
There has been a pattern in India in relation to the death penalty. Sometimes,  really nasty criminals get amnestied, either by the Supreme Court or the President. In March, President Mukherjee commuted the death sentence of Man Bahadur Dewan who was sentenced to death for killing his wife Gauri and two minor sons, Rajib and Kajib, in September 2002. The President did  so at the recommendation of the Home Ministry which sought leniency because of Dewan’s poverty-ridden background.  His predecessor, Pratibha Patil commuted 30 death sentences, including seven to murderers who had also raped their victims, several of whom were children. The Home Ministry recommendations that must have led to this Presidential action would probably make nauseating reading.

Politics in command
However, in cases of terrorism, courts and officials usually respond to the blood lust of society. People accused of terrorism, even those peripheral to the crime, are sentenced to death and  hanged. In this category comes Afzal Guru, who, as the evidence clearly showed, was a side-show in the Parliament House attack case. Yet, somebody needed to hang since the actual perpetrators had been shot dead and the main conspirators were out of our reach in Pakistan.
In the Rajiv Gandhi case, too, Indian investigators only managed to lay their hands on some Indian Tamil dupes of the main conspirators. The chief villains – Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief, Pottu Aman – were in Sri Lanka, the main culprit dead while her support team led by ‘one-eye Jack’ Sivarasan and his team committed  suicide when they were surrounded by the police.
So Nalini, Murugan, G. Perarivalan and Chinna Shanthan were sentenced to death. Nalini’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2000, and earlier this year, the sentences of the other three were also commuted by the Supreme Court. The commutation had more to do with the political pressure brought by various political players in Tamil Nadu, rather than some change of heart of the system.
Politics is playing a role in the death sentence awarded to Balwant Singh Rajaona, convicted for the assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. His execution was scheduled for March 2012, but has been stayed by the Home Ministry following appeals by the SGPC and various Sikh notables of Punjab.
To reiterate, Yakub is not innocent, but neither does he deserve the death sentence,  given the background cited above. The charges against him are not of participating in the military training that was given to several of the conspirators by the Pakistanis, or of landing the RDX and placing the explosives. He was charged with financing the blasts, though his co-accused Mulchand Shah got just five years for the same charge. Indeed, his co-accused in the three charges he faced have all got lesser sentences for the same offence. Don’t forget, of course, that the conviction took place under TADA, a law which has since been discredited and repealed.
In Yakub’s case, the balance has shifted too much towards retribution and is disproportionate to his crimes.
It is for the Indian judicial system to reflect on whether the death sentence has become a whimsical lottery, tilted a bit against the Muslim community. Heinous criminals get away with barbaric crimes, terrorists who are politically convenient are given the benefit of doubt, but to make up for it, peripheral players in Islamist terrorist conspiracies feel the full might of the law.
The Wire July 17, 2015

Modi's foreign policy style is continuity, not change

Continuity, rather than change, is the true hallmark of Narendra Modi’s foreign policy. True, he has been far more vigorous and muscular than his predecessor Manmohan Singh, but the difference is in tone and emphases, rather than substance. 

Nothing brings this out better than the recent developments with Pakistan. After a year of mixed signalling, the two countries have finally settled on the mode of dialogue through which they will seek to resolve all their outstanding issues - which, for those who are tone deaf - also includes Kashmir. 

 

 

Terror agenda 

Dealing with terrorism has a salience in the new India-Pakistan encounter. That is because in the last year, Pakistan has finally made up its mind and decided to fight terrorism, rather than to maintain a deliberate ambiguity because of its need to back groups that target India. 

However, its record remains messy because of its past and one of those issues - the Mumbai attack of 2008 - continues to roil the India-Pakistan efforts towards a détente. 

A second problem for Pakistan is to decide what it wants to do in Kashmir. In the 2004-2008 period, it slowly wound down its commitments there and explored ways of arriving at a modus vivendi with India. Subsequently, it sought to raise the heat again by infiltrating militants into the Valley. But it has realised that there is not much appetite for an armed militancy left in there. 

The recent incidents of firing, almost all of which are certainly linked to infiltrating militants across the LoC, indicate that it is continuing its policy of maintaining a low level of violence in the Valley. But this is a dead end and Islamabad knows it, and that is where the India-Pakistan dialogue between the National Security Advisers comes in. 

By selecting AK Doval to be the point man for his Pakistan policy, Prime Minister Modi has placed a heavy burden on his NSA who is known to be a hawk on issues relating to Pakistan. 

Essentially, Modi is telling Doval that he is depending on his, Doval’s, expertise in resolving things with Pakistan. Whether the NSA chooses a policy which turns up the heat on Pakistan, or whether he chooses other options, at the end of the day, he must hold the can. 

Continuity, with a changed emphasis, also marks India’s US policy. The tenth anniversary of the Indo-US nuclear deal is a good occasion to reflect on what it has achieved and what it hasn’t and the direction to which our relations are headed. 

For India, the deal has been hugely beneficial since it has led to the removal of a raft of technology restrictions. The US has also made it clear during President Obama’s visit in January that it is committed to removing the other restrictions that come through the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement. 

As for the disappointing reactor sales, that is something the US can live with. Most people simply don’t realise that commerce has never really been a factor in America’s foreign policy initiatives. 

All this have been on track since Manmohan Singh’s time. The US knows very well that the former Prime Minister was deeply committed to closer ties with the US. Initially it had apprehensions about the ties with Modi because of the past visa issue, but they were pleasantly surprised when Modi took a pragmatic tack and pursued strong relations with the US. 

Their best manifestation of this has been the Joint Strategic Vision on the Indian Ocean and Asia Pacific that was agreed to in the Obama visit. 

Curious case of China

In the case of China, the continuity manifested is of a different nature, in large measure because of the sheer dynamism of China’s advance in the regions proximate to India. India has sought to meet this with a policy of engagement, along with moves to right the Asian power balance. 

So India is an enthusiastic member of the Chinese-sponsored Asian infrastructure bank, the BRICS bank and, more recently, the SCO. At the same time India has visibly strengthened its ties with the US, Japan and Vietnam. 

Border issue

In trying to deal with the Sino-Indian border, too, little has changed in the parallel process where India is working to develop its border infrastructure to meet a more assertive China even as it works to settle the border dispute through the Special Representative’s dialogue. 

However, if there is one factor that will change the sense of continuity, and what analysts say is a reactive world of Indian foreign policy, it is the Chinese surge in the Indian Ocean and Central Asia, along with a spill-over affect in our neighbourhood of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka. 

To cope with this, New Delhi will have to improve its game by several notches. Prime Minister Modi has brought uncommon energy and focus into the play, but India lacks resources and, more important, the institutional structures and personnel who can flesh out a framework of response and the subsequent policy to deal with the situation. 

Mail Today July 19, 2015

Why it's time for India to invest in Iran

Almost everyone is agreed that the recent Iran-US nuclear deal has opened up a raft of opportunities for India — economic and geopolitical — as well as other countries. But major obstacles still remain, primarily the political divisions in the United States.

At the textbook level, the US Senate has to approve international treaties by a two-thirds majority vote. But as per current practice, the deal is deemed as an "agreement" and not "treaty" and hence Congress can be ignored. But in a democracy things don't quite go by the textbook. As things stand, Obama and the Congress have agreed to have the latter the right to vote to void the deal. But the President will veto such a vote, and its mainly Republican opponents will not be able to get a significant number of Democrats to overcome the veto. Lifting Iran sanctions will also be a problem, though the President has the right to suspend Congress-approved sanctions for two years before requiring its approval to lift them.

The US opponents must mull the consequences of blocking the deal at this stage. Till now the P-5+1 group of big powers has presented a united front and forced Iran to come to the table. But should the US renege, Russia and China, who have not been particularly happy about the Iran sanctions, will pull out, as will countries like India and Japan, which have borne the adverse consequences of the embargo.

New Delhi followed the US' lead in squeezing its oil trade with Iran. Prior to the sanctions, in 2011, Iran was India's second largest supplier of crude oil after Saudi Arabia. Currently it is seventh. Though India was one of six nations allowed to purchase a limited quantity of crude under the sanctions regime.

Indian companies like Essar, Tata and oil and gas majors have been mooting investments in Iran since the early-2000s, but they have not put down any serious investments in the country because of the sanctions which actually began in the mid-2000s. As a result, in April this year, the frustrated Iranians withdrew an offer to Indian firms to develop the Farzad B Gas field.

Over the past five years, New Delhi developed a variety of tactics to deal with the Iranian situation. Besides getting exemptions from oil trade sanctions, India also managed to work out a Rupee-Rial arrangement to maintain their trade relations. Indian companies were advised to work through Turkish, Chinese and Russian entities, or set up corporations without vulnerable US assets.

India has made it clear from the outset that it is against Iran getting nuclear weapons. This may sound strange coming from New Delhi, but unlike India, Iran signed the NPT and has given a solemn commitment that it will not make nuclear weapons. In 2005, as part of the western drive against Teheran's dubious actions on the nuclear front, India voted twice in the IAEA to censure Iran. But, most people acknowledged that New Delhi had little choice, considering that it was at a critical phase in its own nuclear deal with Washington.

First, and most importantly, what binds India and Iran are geopolitical interests. We have been together since 1990 in helping Afghan parties to fight the Taliban. In the 2000s in Afghanistan, India built a highway from Zaranj, which is close to the Iran border, to Delaram, to facilitate the linkage of the country from the non-Pakistani territory in the west. Both of us also have a somewhat jaundiced view of Pakistan who we border, albeit for different reasons.

Now Iran has also emerged as an important ally in fighting the Islamic State. While India may not be immediately threatened by the Daesh, it cannot be complacent. However, it can be sure that the Iranians who are the targets of Sunni fanatics will be on the same side as us.

Second, Iran offers a vast market for Indian products. In the last few years, India has been exporting rice and sugar to Iran against Rupees accumulated in Indian banks due to the US sanctions. But as trade normalises, India has opportunities to develop a market for automobile parts, pharmaceuticals and IT products, provided we understand that now we will be facing competition from a variety of sources.

Third, Iran's vast oil and gas resources, which are proximate to India, are vital for our energy security. So far we have dithered on gas projects, as well as in developing the Chah Bahar port. But of late, things have been moving. During his meeting with Prime Minister Modi at the sidelines of the Ufa summit, days before the final agreement between Iran and the P5+1 powers was announced, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran called on India to invest in infrastructure projects worth $8 billion.

Fourth, Iran offers us wider geopolitical opportunities by developing multi-modal routes to Central Asia and Russia. The elements of two parallel North-South Corridors — one going north from Bandar Abbas to the Caspian, and thence to Russia and Europe, and the second going from Chah Bahar to Afghanistan and Central Asia are all there. What is needed is to complete several critical rail and road links that Rouhani is inviting us to build. This would be a worthy riposte to the Chinese Belt Road Initiative.

The opening of Iran will alter the geopolitics of south-western Asia. Even so, India needs to tread with care. There are other factors we need to take into account — our ties with Israel and key partners like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and, for that matter, the United States. But this should not in any way constrain our initiatives with Iran. We need to move beyond the phase of dithering that has characterised our ties with Tehran for the last decade.

Mid Day July 21, 2015