206
The end of the Cold War coincided with Iran partly abandoning its
hostility towards both the superpowers and treading a path of pragmatism
and accommodation towards its neighbours. It also sought stable new
friends for its oil exports as well as for trade and market access. Around the
same time, India began exploring new friends in the region. Orphaned by
the sudden disappearance of the USSR, India was confronted with its
traditional friend Iraq coming under UN sanctions after the Kuwait crisis.
Hence, India and Iran, who were looking for new friends, found one
another and energy became a component of their growing friendship since
the early 1990s. There were as many as seven major political exchanges
between the two since the end of the Cold War.^2 Despite the clergy domi-
nation of the Iranian polity and society, the Indian leaders and elites have
been flagging civilizational linkages and the Iranian pragmatism to seek
closer ties with Tehran.
However, the nuclear controversy since 2003 had considerably affected
and slowed down the pace of Indo-Iranian relations and partly contrib-
uted to the near abandonment of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline
(Purushothaman 2012 ). The US pressures also resulted in India voting
against Iran both in the International Atomic Energy Agency and in the
UN Security Council. The economic sanctions by the US and EU impeded
India’s ability to pay for the oil imports from Iran and stop the exports of
oil products to the Islamic republic. Indeed, the failure of the realization
of energy partnership visualized in the Delhi Declaration signed during
the visit of President Mohammed Khatami in January 2003 (India, MEA
2003 ) could be blamed on the US factor.
In addition, New Delhi misread the signals from Washington and
ignored factoring in the US-Iran tensions when it was seeking closer ties
with both the parties. The Indian desire to obtain civilian nuclear technol-
ogy from the US while being indifferent towards the American concerns
over the Iranian nuclear controversy proved naïve and short- sighted. This
approach severely curtailed India’s diplomatic space vis-à-vis both the par-
ties. The US pressure tactics and the threat of Iran-related sanctions
became the compelling factors for the Indian votes in the IAEA and
UNSC and these, in turn, robbed India of any diplomatic leverage against
both these countries (Dutta 2005 ).
(^2) These were the visits by President Hashmi Rafsanjani (April 1995), President Mohammed
Khatami (January 2003) and President Hasan Rouhani (February 2018) to India and Prime
Ministers P. V. Narasimha Rao (September 1993), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (April 2001),
Manmohan Singh (August 2012) and Narendra Modi (May 2016) to Iran.
P. R. KUMARASWAMY AND MD. M. QUAMAR