After Pakistan, is Iran ‘exporting’ terror to India?

Monday’s bomb attack on an Israeli embassy vehicle in New Delhi, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed on Iran and the Hezbollah, is bound to intensify the diplomatic heat on India to stop trading with Iran at a time when the US and Israel are tightening the sanctions squeeze on it.

Iran has rejected the Israeli accusation of Iranian involvement as “sheer lies”. Iran’s ambassador to New Delhi Mehdi Nabizadeh dismissed Netanyahu’s charge as “untrue and sheer lies, like previous times.”

Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Ramin Mehmanparast went further to suggest that the blast was the work of Israel to defame Iran internationally. “It seems that these suspicious incidents are designed by the Zionist regime and carried out with the aim of harming Iran’s reputation,” he said.

On the face of it, it seems counter-intuitive, even downright lunacy, for Iran to use Indian territory as the base for an extra-territorial attack on Israel. After all, India is one of the last major economies that is resolutely holding out against abiding by the sanctions imposed on Iran – and has even told the US off bluntly.

Even as recently as last week, Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai, who was on a visit to Washington, told US authorities that India would not sever its oil trade with Iran; Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee too had been extraordinarily blunt in conveying the same message to the US when he too was in the US last fortnight.

India has in recent days come under immense pressure from US officials and Jewish lobby groups in the US to sever its relationship with Iran. The American Jewish Congress, a strong pressure group in the US, recently wrote to India’s ambassador in the US Nirupama Rao expressing “alarm” and “dismay”over india’s move to elevate commercial interests with Iran over “vital security concerns”.

After Monday’s bomb blast, India will find it “increasingly difficult” to placate both Iran, on the one hand, and the US and Israel, on the other, says Lisa Curtis, Senior Research Fellow for South Asia in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

“Now that Israeli diplomats have been targeted in New Delhi, it will be increasingly difficult for Indian officials to sweep under the carpet their growing trade relations with Tehran.” India, Curtis added, would have to seriously factor the costs of oil trade with Iran to its rapidly growing defence partnership with Israel.”

The skills of Indian strategists who seek to balance India’s role as a growing global power with its need to guard against the prospect of rising regional instability will be tested in coming months as the international confrontation with Iran intensifies, Curtis noted.

In effect, diplomatic pressure is already piling on India.

So, it would be sheer idiocy for Iran – or the Shia army of Hezbollah over which Iran has control – to use India as the platform for an attack, knowing that it would intensify pressure on India to end its trade relationship with Iran.

But if there’s one thing missing in Iran’s strategic posturing over its avowed nuclear plans, it is the semblance of sanity. Unlike Pakistan, which acquired its nuclear assets on the sly by flying beneath the radar of international attention, Iran has been drawing excessive attention to its nuclear program with to its over-the-top rhetoric directed against Israel and the US. Even the self-preservation instinct isn’t kicking in strong enough among Iran’s leaders.

But whereas India could afford to go out on a diplomatic limb in trading with Iran despite the ongoing war of nerves between that regime and Israel, it could be harder to defend the possibility that Iran is perhaps ‘exporting’ terror to India, even if it is directed at a third country.

Indian diplomats have in the past fretted that Iran was looking to influence opinion makers in India, including journalists and policy thinktank officials, to project an “anti-American” view and influence Indian foreign policy to acquire a pro-Iran, anti-US tilt.

An Indian diplomat confided to US officials in 2007 that there was evidence that Iran “has been buying off journalists, clerics and editors in Shia-populated areas of Uttar Pradesh and Kashmir, doling out large sums to stoke anti-Americanism.” He also suggested that increasingly, it appeared that Iran was “focussing squarely on influential elite audiences in Delhi, with a view to shaping the debate of India’s (nuclear energy) policy and the (Indo-US) nuclear deal.”

But whereas such propaganda wars may be tolerable from an Indian perspective, any suggestion that Iran is now going beyond that to use the weak internal security situation in India as an opening to wage terror attacks on diplomats of third countries is fraught with grave consequences.

Even if India doesn’t wish to be caught up in the tug-of-war in West Asia over Israel’s opposition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it might prove increasingly difficult for India to avoid being dragged in. That faraway battle is now coming closer home to India.