207At the same time, the conclusion of JCPOA and the lifting of multilat-
eral sanctions against Iran have spurred greater Indian engagements with
Tehran, including its commitment to building the Chabahar Port and
energy exploitation. The expansion of the Chabahar—whose phase one
was inaugurated in December 2017—and its connectivity plans with other
parts of Iran and Afghanistan through Indian investments have run into
delays due to various problems, including the Iranian penchant for rene-
gotiations of agreements and the slow Indian bureaucracy. The bilateral
relations remain stable and Prime Minister Modi’s May 2016 visit seemed
to have smoothened things but the situation has become uncertain with
the lingering question of the nuclear deal in the wake of the strong state-
ments emanating from the Trump administration.
India’s growing politico-energy engagements with Iran, however, coin-
cide with rising Arab-Persian and especially Saudi-Iranian tension and
rivalry. The siege of Mecca in November 1979 (Trofimov 2007 ) and the
riots in the Shia-majority Eastern province of Saudi Arabia (Jones 2006 ),
though not directly related to Iran, sent shock waves in the monarchy. The
Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 and the formation of the GCC
the following year added to regional tensions and rivalry. Though there
were attempts in the 1990 for rapprochement, the revolutionary Shia-
Islamist regime in Tehran and the status quoist Sunni Islamist monarchy
in Riyadh could never come to terms with one another. In other words, if
India had ‘Pakistan’ problem clouding its foreign policy, Saudi Arabia
carries the Iran ‘problem’ in dealing with the outside world.
The role and influence of Iran upon Indo-Gulf relations has become
complicated and even troublesome. In the 1950s and 1960s India’s
engagements were Cairo-centric and this shifted to Baghdad in the 1970s
and 1980s and the relations were primarily economic with a limited politi-
cal component. However, with the Iran-Iraq War and the Kuwait crisis,
India was looking for an alternate economic partner at the end of the
Cold War and so was Iran. Under such circumstances, both countries
explored the possibility of bringing in the Iranian gas to India through the
IPI pipeline passing through Pakistan. Due to security concerns, pricing
issues and the US pressure, this project never materialized (Sahay and
Roshandel 2010 ). However, Iran continued to be India’s primary trading
partner, and though the US pressures dipped the quantity of crude
imports, Iran has been among the largest suppliers of crude oil to India
(Ray Dadwal 2015 ). As its energy trade with Iran was affected by the
INTERNATIONAL FACTORS