The recent Iranian election has thrown up Hassan Rouhani as a surprise winner in the presidential race. Will it end the isolation of Iran following Ahmadinejad’s hardline policiesIJ What does it hold for India and the rest of the worldIJ
The Iranian presidential election, throwing up Hassan Rouhani as a surprise winner in the very first round, is of great significance. It sends multiple messages, many still being debated in capitals abroad. First, it is being asked whether this has surprised Supreme leader Ali Khamenei, or it is a convoluted passion play designed by him both to appease his hard-line supporters, having let them all run, and ensure the victory of a pragmatist cleric. Second, whether or not the outcome was pre-planned, as is unlikely, the message of the Iranian people is quite clear. They are sick of the first non-clerical but radical leadership of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose eight years are ending in an isolated Iran, its economy damaged and increased friction with the US, Israel and the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries. Iran chairs the Non-Aligned Movement but this brings it vain glory without concrete benefits, a case of ideology triumphing over national interests.
Perhaps no leader could have come to the job better prepared than Rouhani. He had been at the fulcrum of Iranian decision-making for over a decade when he left immediately after the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005, having been not only the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council but also the principal nuclear negotiator from October 2003. He obviously enjoyed the trust of Khamenei, confirmed by his candidature not being black-balled by the Guardians Council, which vetted all candidates. His deputy Syed Hossein Mousavian, who was a great help to me during my tenure as Ambassador to Iran (2003-05), was arrested, harassed and finally let off in a vindictive action by Ahmadinejad to show that earlier negotiators had bargained away core Iranian interests. Mousavian in his book The Iranian Nuclear Crisis, written from Princeton where he now works, details how a more nationalistic line complicated the nuclear negotiations which led to the case going to the UN Security Council. Thus today, as compared to when Rouhani relinquished authority in 2005, not only is the nuclear case more complicated, but also the inter-play of the influence of Al Qaeda travelling east from Af-Pak and the democratic force of Arab Spring moving in the reverse direction have sucked Iran into a direct confrontation with the US, Sunni countries and Israel in Syria.
The initial reaction of the P5 countries has been encouraging, many of whom spoke on the sidelined of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland on June 17-18. France is willing to let Iran attend the Geneva conference on Syria if Rouhani’s pragmatism persists. The UK would
like to restore diplomatic relations to the full level, downgraded since 2011. The US has made sanguine noises. The taste, however, of the pudding is in the eating. This is the same moment that Iran faced in 1988, when the nation was exhausted after eight years of blood-letting in the Iran-Iraq war. H Rafsanjani and others managed to convince a recalcitrant Imam Khomeini that national will and treasury could no longer sustain the war effort. Iran accepted a peace settlement that could have come at a lower cost in the first two years of the war, when Iran had penetrated up to Basra. Khomeini called it drinking “the poisoned chalice”.
Is the current Supreme leader ready to do likewise nowIJ The analogy may not be entirely accurate as the stature that Khomeini enjoyed has never been available to Khamenei. His religious credentials have been suspect and that is why his peer group has never accepted his elevation to Grand Ayatollah. His first backing Ahmadinejad in 2009 and then falling out with him have caused distortions in the governance structures that were created post-Khomeini, in which the interests of the clerics were balanced against those from the military and their auxiliary organisations like the Basij. Thus, to de-escalate abroad there would have to be some re-balancing at home with a push-back of the expanded role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has tentacles now in oil and gas sectors. This expansion occurred when Ahmadinejad began berating the link of Bazaaris or business community and clerics, a prime example of which has been the family of Rafsanjani.
The change is significant for India. The high points of the India-Iran engagement were: Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to Tehran in 2001 and a return visit by President Mohammed Khatami to New Delhi in 2003. They resulted in the Tehran and Delhi Declarations respectively. Taliban had been deposed from their perch in Kabul, US-Iran relations were manageable and America had still not intervened in Iraq. By the time I arrived in Tehran in September 2003, the strategic environment had changed. The dangerous tentacles of the AQ Khan nuclear bazaar, emanating from Pakistan under the sponsorship of
its military, were out in the open. Iran happened to be at the middle of it. That is the situation that Rouhani was called upon to manage. Additionally, with the ejection of the Saddam Hussein regime, the US was ascendant in the region, being to Iran’s east and west. The suspension of the Iranian nuclear programme and the commencement of talks with G3 (the UK, France and Germany) were the starting point of a complex game that Iran has played of talking, incrementally developing their civilian nuclear programme and then stone-walling. This two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back dance went awry after the exit of Rouhani, leading to the current impasse.
In an op-ed in The New York Times on June 20, SH Mousavian and MA Shabani have suggested how the impasse can be ended. Mousavian having worked closely with Rouhani obviously is speaking from knowledge, if not approval. Essentially, he warns that the US should not assume that Rouhani’s victory is a sign of public fatigue due to the sanctions and thus opt for tightening them over engagement. Similarly, he warns Iranians to not treat the Rouhani victory as ‘national resurgence’. The warning is valid as the history of US-Iran relations is littered with opportunities lost.
For India, the victory could not have come at a better time. The engagement with the US became a burden for India-Iran relations as Washington tried drawing Delhi into its corner in its fight with Tehran. The net result was a gradual downgrading of relations, perforce due to the difficulty of doing business through the maze of international sanctions. The Indian votes at the IAEA, extracted by US as an article of faith, became concomitantly an irritant in the Iran-India relations. The relevance of Iran for India rests on three considerations: Access to Central Asia, developments in Afghanistan and oil and gas or energy security.
The Afghan issue is reaching a point where Indian anxiety is mounting in proportion to the increasing dependence of the US on Pakistan to bring the Taliban and their associates like the Haqqanis to the negotiating table. In the last few days the manner of the opening of the Doha office of the Taliban has irked President Hamid Karzai so much that he has called off talks on the future of US forces in Afghanistan. By some accounts, US Secretary of State John Kerry, arriving rather belatedly in India this weekend for the India-US strategic dialogue, has been negotiating with Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistani Chief of staff, the engaging of the Taliban. This would be of concern to other neighbours of Afghanistan, particularly India, Iran and Russia. In fact, the Russians have thrown their weight behind President Karzai.
Sadly Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s advisers are so stuck in the China-Pakistan quagmire that they took two days to prepare a congratulatory message for Rowhani. They should have sensed that the election outcome was an extraordinary development that needed seizing. It is hoped that as Iran returns to the diplomatic track, India would step up its engagement with Iran. There is still one lurking danger that Rowhani does not assume office for another month or so. Even during the transfer of power from Khatami to Ahmadinejad in 2005, the IAEA seals were broken in the dying days of the previous regime. I hope elements in the IRGC, who would be playing a major role in weaponisation if any, may not decide to indulge in an adventure. By Western accounts Iran has enough enriched uranium, if enriched further to weapon’s grade, for about six devices. Hopefully, this will not happen and Iran will take another swig from the poisoned chalice.
The writer is a former Ambassador to Iran