India’s Balancing Act With the U.S. and Iran

WSJ -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to India earlier this week came at an interesting time: It coincided with the visit of a trade delegation from Iran, which the U.S. has been pressuring India to severe business ties with.

During her three-day visit, Mrs. Clinton praised New Delhi for beginning to reduce oil purchases from Iran, a major exporter of crude oil to India, but said it could do more.

A day after Mrs. Clinton left, the Iranian trade delegation sealed deals to buy shipments of rice, sugar and soybeans from India, as part of Tehran’s plant to use such pacts to get around U.S. financial sanctions on its oil shipments.

Here is a roundup of what several commentators and Indian newspapers had to say about New Delhi’s balancing act with Washington and Tehran.

“Call it a coincidence,” began Mint’s Thursday editorial, headlined “India’s Persian problem.”

“The American came asking India to squeeze the Iranians; the latter came exploring trade opportunities,” it said. “It is seldom that India has been caught in the middle of two friendly countries that have icy relations with each other as do Iran and the US.”

The paper says India’s choices are difficult: “On the one hand, for its wider engagement with the world, it makes great sense for it to have the US as a friend watching its back.”

“On the other hand, Iran is a friendly country. India’s requirements of oil are only one aspect of a much wider relationship. If anything, Iran is one country that is very important to India from a geopolitical perspective. It is India’s gateway to central Asia. It is also our access route to Afghanistan. These are issues that cannot be ignored or made subservient to other interests.”

“It would have been much easier to maintain trade, energy and political ties with Iran, had India intervened to help mend US-Iran ties,” the paper suggested. “Neither side mistrusts India and it is in our interest to help matters. To be sure this is a formidable problem not amenable to easy resolution. But India did not even make an effort in that direction.”

The result, the paper says, is that “Americans now want us to reduce, if not eliminate, oil purchases from Iran. Dollar trade, something that Iran (or for that matter any other country) will desire, is now almost impossible. Deepening political ties with Tehran will be suspect in American eyes.”

“All this could have been avoided if we had taken the right steps earlier,” it concludes.

In an editorial titled “Crude Pressure” on Wednesday The Hindu said the U.S. was asking New Delhi “to undermine its own economic and strategic interests by cutting back on oil imports and other commercial transactions with Tehran in order to comply with extra-territorial sanctions that have no basis in international law.”

The paper said New Delhi “must not take the American pressure lying down.”

Apart from India’s need for oil, the paper said, there were two reasons why India shouldn’t give in to American pressure. Firstly,“India’s only reliable land-route into Afghanistan and Central Asia runs through Iran,” and secondly, “the current U.S. approach is likely to make the Iranian — and regional — security situation worse, not better.”

“As friends, we owe it to the Americans — and ourselves — to tell them that the path they are going down now can only produce greater instability and insecurity,” the paper concludes.

In its editorial Thursday, the Financial Chronicle said India should not reduce its oil import from Iran under U.S. pressure. “It is only for the US and the EU that Iran is a rogue nuclear state that must be taught a lesson,” the paper said. “But Iran’s rightly-or-wrongly perceived nuclear threat mainly concerns the West Asian region and more specifically Israel. Failure of the regional countries to negotiate peace among themselves is now causing global pain that is only being aggravated by US and EU interventions.”

“Already, non-UN-authorised actions of the US and the EU through their respective banking and financial systems to choke receipt of payments by Iran against its oil exports has severely hampered Indian purchases of crude oil from that country,” the paper says. “But the other scenario of stopping all imports from Iran would have far worse repercussions for the economy.”

The Economic Times said in a Thursday editorial that New Delhi “has done the right thing by pushing back against US pressure to stop importing oil from Iran.”

“America’s foreign policy goals in this part of the world do overlap India’s but are not identical with them,” the paper says. “Oil from Iran, which holds the world’s second-largest reserves of crude, means that India does not become overly dependent on its principal supplier, Saudi Arabia. And gas would be welcome, too.”

The paper concludes by harping on India’s historic cordial “economic, cultural and political ties” with Iran. “Washington’s foreign policy objectives shouldn’t disrupt those,” it says.