Eye on the Middle East | The India-Iran bilateral and a test of patience

Sectarian interests, testing friends

This was not the first puzzling Iranian provocation of a South Asian state in recent months – in January, Iran triggered an unprecedented exchange of airstrikes with Pakistan with both states claiming to target terror infrastructure and causing civilian casualties. While both states reconciled at an equally surprising pace and made grand public gestures of mutual friendship, the Indian MEA’s statement at the time implicitly empathised with Iran’s need to act against terror.

Moreover, Iran has a history of calling out communal violence in India – in March 2020, Khamenei asked India to “confront extremist Hindus…to prevent India’s isolation from the world of Islam” while Iran’s justice ministry condemned anti-Muslim violence. Earlier, following India’s abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, senior Iranian theological leaders criticised India’s actions. Khamenei himself called on India to “prevent the bullying and oppression of Muslims in this region”. Tehran’s inherent interest in making such statements is in line with its self-professed revolutionary need to advocate for “Muslim” (not just Shia) rights globally, which has usually made the Kashmir issue a ripe candidate for the taking. Such expressions, however, have not necessarily triggered a publicly hostile Indian reaction – in March 2020, India summoned the Iranian ambassador for a private protest against Khamenei’s comments, for instance. Arguably, it is the inexplicable timing of Khamenei’s recent tweet and its provocative nature without any apparent new triggers which garnered India’s public reaction. Moreover, even as communal hate crimes/lynchings occur in India with the Supreme Court also taking cognisance, Iran’s unenviable track record of severe human rights abuses removes any claimed locus standi; this is also the thinly veiled criticism that the MEA itself levelled.

Tehran is still reeling from the aftermath of the Mahsa Amini protests, which took on a strong anti-government/anti-Khamenei colour. Iran is consistently under global fire for suppressing and executing dissidents and critics. The country also leads in the number of executions per year, second only to China. Among its 853 executions in 2023 (including women and children), 20% belonged to the ethnic Baluch minority (5% of the population). Almost all executions are judicially sanctioned. However, despite these fires, Iran has also been keen to project its pan-Islamic face, to complement its rejuvenated relationship with (Wahhabi Sunni) Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states such as Sudan. Just this week, Iran appointed the first Sunni provincial governor (Kurdistan) in the 45 years of the Islamic Republic’s existence, as Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian increasingly calls for even better ties with Riyadh.

Geopolitical discomfort

Despite its claims to advocate for Muslims worldwide, Iran very much tempers such expressions according to its geopolitical priorities. For instance, Tehran actively refrains from commenting on the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province, given the deepening partnership between Tehran and Beijing – boosted by a 25-year multi-sectoral cooperation agreement in 2020 and subsequent deals to strengthen security and economic engagement. If anything, the Iranian ambassador was lauded by China’s Global Times in August 2023 for his visit to Xinjiang and his comments on the region’s “remarkable” achievements. Iran’s silence on Xinjiang and its soft legitimisation of Chinese actions is reflective of the degree to which Iran is willing to sacrifice ideology at the altar of Chinese goodwill. To the contrary, Iran evidently feels it has less to lose by provoking India than China, with Tehran’s reliance on the latter increasingly deepening. In January of this year, Iran’s oil exports reached an all-time high despite international sanctions, with China buying around 90% of Iranian crude, to meet its burgeoning domestic demand. While Iran was India’s second-largest oil supplier at one point (2011-12), India stopped all Iranian crude imports since the expiry of its CAATSA waiver.

As this column noted, despite new cooperation agreements between India and Iran on Chabahar, New Delhi’s experience has been rocky, with the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) struggling to take off. While the INSTC services a different route, ending in eastern Europe, India’s fresh investment in, and spearheading of, the IMEEC indubitably troubles Iran, like it does Turkey which even responded to the IMEEC with a competing project – the Development Road Project. Iran’s discomfort would be supplemented by an expansion of the scale and scope of India’s cooperation with the UAE, which recently included an MoU on nuclear cooperation. Iran’s (reciprocated) rivalry with the UAE and Mohammad bin Zayed’s own aversion to Iran is historic and enduring, despite steady diplomatic ties since 2019. While these might not have acted as immediate triggers for Khamenei’s latest statement on India, they certainly acted as political sediment that dents bilateral trust.

Given Tehran and New Delhi’s prolonged efforts in Chabahar and India maintaining a positive political relationship with Iran despite compliance with US sanctions economically, their current partnerships are unlikely to be at risk. However, with Iran’s relationship with China burgeoning and India increasingly leaning West, the value that New Delhi sees in the overall Iran bilateral might gradually reduce, resulting in less tolerance for Iranian comments on Indian domestic affairs. Essentially then, while India’s approach to the economic bilateral with Iran has been marked by patience due to the international sanctions regime, so too has been its weathering of Iran’s sporadic criticism. The latter, with or without the former, is likely to reduce unless Iran changes tack.

Bashir Ali Abbas is a research associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi, and a South Asia Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington DC. The views expressed are personal.