India and Iran: Tied in tandem Premium

India and Iran are civilisational states with a historic connection whose roots and reflections are distinctly witnessed even today.

India and Iran are civilisational states with a historic connection whose roots and reflections are distinctly witnessed even today. Civilisational states, by virtue of their conserved knowledge and strength, are usually robust and resilient in their responses to challenges from expected or unexpected quarters. India and Iran have also weathered many such storms in their long journey. Iran became the major bone of contention, especially after the 1979 Islamic revolution and the effort by the new Ayatollah regime to create a Shia crescent in a largely Sunni- dominated Arab world and beyond, and new fault lines were created in West Asia.

Geo-regions contestation ensued between Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic. The new regime’s disdain for the Satanic United States and artificial existence and legitimacy of the little Satan in Israel, as well as perceived capitulation by the oil-rich Gulf monarchies to the Western masters, created the new roadblocks in the creation of regional consensus and security architecture, to this day. An Iraq-Iran war was engineered by the Americans, which lasted through the 1980s. Then, Iraq invaded Kuwait, again with the connivance of the U.S. Eventually, former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein was also deposed and killed in 2003 by the U.S. and NATO military invasion on the basis of manufactured evidence of Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction. This folly had an undesirable outcome, too, which placed Iraq under the Shia influence of Iran expanding its outreach.

This article is from The Hindu e-book. Iran: Revolution in retreat

These also brought about exceptional instability and the onset of terrorism in the region and beyond. All these have been causes of deep concern for India.

Pursuant to the geopolitical divide in the region, Tehran embarked on its ambitious nuclear programme, which was an anathema for Israel and the West as well as Gulf powers like Saudi Arabia — which is the custodian of two holy mosques in Makkah and Medina and hence, a de facto leader of the Islamic world. Iran’s nuclear bomb was perceived as a direct threat to their own suzerainty, superiority and security, given the hot and cold relationship in various periods of history. It is ironic that during Cold War 1.0, all three of them, viz. Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia, were part of the U.S.-led bloc.

Moreover, Iran has signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its enrichment capabilities, combined with its suspicious connection with Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, deepened the suspicion. Hence, covert CIA-Mossad operations against Iranian nuclear scientists and nuclear plants and establishments were carried out to decimate and delay the Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon. This, of course, was denied by the Iranian regime, claiming that they wished to pursue a civil nuclear programme for energy uses only. When the trust deficit is deep, nothing sounds reasonable or rational, irrespective of the intent.