Iran's changing political trajectory

New winds are blowing in West Asia these days. After a five year freeze, US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will be resuming this week. Washington is hoping for an agreement within nine months on the terms of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, including drawing a border, agreeing on security arrangements and deciding the fate of Palestinian refugees.

Ahead of these talks, Israel decided to approve the building of nearly 1,200 more settlement homes even as it agreed to release 26 long-held Palestinian security prisoners — highlighting an apparent settlements-for-prisoners trade-off that got both sides back to peace talks.

Notwithstanding the Obama administration’s optimism, there are very low expectations from these talks with Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei already suggesting that the results of any US-hosted talks will eventually damage the Palestinian side as “the US is not a real mediator, it stands by the Zionists.” Yet together with the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president in June, this is probably the most positive news that has come out of West Asia in a long time.

Rouhani has announced that moderation would be the way forward for him in domestic politics with a focus on economic issues, women’s rights and a reduction in governmental interference in the everyday life of the Iranians. In foreign affairs, he has insisted that Iran “has a serious intention to resolve the nuclear issue while maintaining our rights and trying to ease the concerns of all parties in the short-term.”

Though Washington has suggested that Tehran would find a “willing partner” in the US if it was willing to “engage substantively and seriously to meet its international obligations and find a peaceful solution to this issue,” Rouhani has been critical of America’s “contradictory” dual track policy of diplomacy and sanctions on Iran.

Rouhani’s win symbolizes a deep yearning for change in Iran though it is not yet evident if this would be a major challenge to the Iranian establishment — a tight alliance of the ruling clerics and the ultra-powerful Revolutionary Guard — which will continue to hold all the effective power and set the agenda on all major decisions such as Iran’s nuclear program and its dealings with the West.

The nuclear question continues to dominate the thinking of the world outside Iran. The nuclear negotiations between the West and Tehran have been on hold for the past five months with Iran continuing to enrich uranium and install a new generation of advanced centrifuges. Israel, for one, has made it clear that it has no reason to believe that a new government in Tehran will back away from a pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The Arab states in the region may not be as vocal but their concerns are rising at a time when the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to be gaining ground in the civil war in his country with the help of his allies — Russia, the Lebanon-based militant organization Hezbollah and its sponsor Iran.

There seems to be a certain inevitability about the Iranian capability to assemble a crude nuclear device in the near future. And like other nuclear powers, this poses a dilemma for India as well.

India’s official position on the Iranian nuclear question has been relatively straightforward. Although India believes that Iran has the right to pursue civilian nuclear energy, it has insisted that Iran should clarify doubts raised by the IAEA regarding Iran’s compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  India has long maintained that it does not see further nuclear proliferation as being in its interests.

This position has as much to do with India’s desire to project itself as a responsible nuclear state as with the real danger that further proliferation in its extended neighbourhood could endanger its security. India has continued to affirm its commitment to enforce sanctions against Iran as mandated since 2006 by the UN Security Council, when the first set of sanctions was imposed.

However, much like Beijing and Moscow, New Delhi has argued that such sanctions should not hurt the Iranian populace and expressed disapproval of sanctions by individual countries that restrict investments by third countries in Iran’s energy sector.

India shares with the West the belief that Iranian nuclear ambitions would destabilize the Middle East. The Indian prime minister is on record suggesting that a nuclear Iran is not in India’s national interest. But New Delhi does not have the luxury of viewing Iranian nuclear ambitions only through the prism of Iran-Israel rivalry, a norm in the West.

India, a country with a sizable Sunni and Shia population, has to consider this issue from a wider perspective where the Iranian nuclear drive instigates Arab-Iran and Sunni-Shia rivalry. For Tehran, its nuclear ambitions are as much a counter to a two-front encirclement of Shias by Sunni Pakistan and Sunni Saudi Arabia, as it is about ending Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region.

Apart from the nuclear question, India’s ties with Iran have been under strain in recent months. There has been disquiet in India about Iran questioning the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s decision to exempt New Delhi from export regulations of nuclear material and technology at the NPT review conference held in May. 

With western sanctions making it difficult to ship oil, India’s oil imports from Iran declined by over 26.6 percent in the financial year ending March 2013, making Iran India’s sixth-largest crude oil supplier behind Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela, Kuwait and the UAE.

As a result, New Delhi would be hoping that the internal power struggle within Iran, growing tensions between Iran and its Arab neighbours, and Iran’s continued defiance of the global nuclear order would reach some sort of resolution after the assumption of office by Rouhani. This is important if Indo-Iranian ties are to achieve some semblance of normalcy.

The author teaches at King’s College, London