Escalation of tensions will delay Indian plan of developing sea route from Chabahar port in Iran

Sandeep Dikshit
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, January 3

Strategists in global capitals went into a huddle shortly after the White House announced the killing of the head of Iran’s Quds Force General Hussein Soleimani, a man hailed as a hero in his country but denounced by the West as a person with “blood on his hands”.

An escalation in tensions will once again delay the Indian game-plan of developing a sea route from the Iranian port of Chabahar, first into Afghanistan and then into Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan. Until Thursday, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Ravish Kumar had maintained “lot of good news’’ is coming from the port since it began operations in December 2018. Since then, 4,500 containers and almost 0.5 million tones of cargo has moved between India and Afghanistan.

During the recent Indo-US two plus two meeting of Foreign and Defence Ministers in Washington, the US side had confirmed the special exemption to the development of the Chabahar port and a rail link from its Iran sanctions, provided there was no involvement of the IRGC.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had flown to Tehran and met Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to accelerate the project. Senior officials of India, Iran and Afghanistan had also met to discuss the expansion of Chabahar port’s operations to more Indian ports.

India will also be affected by the expected spike in oil prices which had been on an upward trend leading to a round of increases in LPG cylinder and aviation turbine fuel (ATF) earlier this week. Global oil prices have started inching up as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif termed Soleimani’s drone assassination at Baghdad airport as extremely dangerous and a foolish escalation while official Iranian TV channels termed the killing “an act of war”. The Persian Gulf that Iran has the military capability to close down ships out one-third of the world’s oil requirements.

The killing is the White House’s mode of going one-up in the proxy battle being fought in Iraq and Syria between Iran-supported militias and the garrisoned US forces. Earlier this week, the US embassy in Baghdad was stormed by militias whose logistics and command and control centres in Syria and Iraq were hit by American airstrikes which, in turn, were a response to militant attacks on their bases.

Quds Force is the elite arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Corps (IRGC), a US sanctioned entity whose complete exclusion from the project was Washington’s precondition for giving India a special exemption to develop the infrastructure at Chabahar port and lay a railway line to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

IRGC said Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of the Hashd Shaabi or the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), was also killed along with Soleimani in the strikes that targeted their vehicle on the Baghdad International Airport road. PMF is suspected of having orchestrated the attack on the US embassy in Baghdad but is also in the forefront of battling ISISDaesh militias in Syria.

The attack on the Baghdad embassy had rattled the Americans into evacuating most of their staff and airlifting marines besides a big complement of troops into Iraq on Thursday besides asking its civil aviation to exercise caution while using Pakistani airspace for fear of retaliatory attacks from militants.

In the US, there was bipartisan consensus that Soleimani had led the Iranian effort to counter US influence in the region, often by violence, but most Democrats including Presidential hopefuls like Elizabeth Warren felt this move will escalate the situation with Iran and even drag the US into a costly war that it should have avoided.

However, an increase in US-Iran hostilities has already led to India being pressurised into purchasing oil from Iran or investing in any of the oil blocks it has offered to state-run oil companies. It may now have to contend in a further delay to its plans to develop the Iranian port.