New
Delhi: India on Sunday flagged off a shipment of wheat for
Afghanistan through Iran’s Chabahar port—marking the operationalization of the
port for the trans-shipment of goods from India to the landlocked country.
The development is seen as a
significant one as it torpedoes Pakistan’s veto over trade between India and
Afghanistan—a move aimed at circumscribing India’s role in Afghanistan. And it
comes almost 15 years after India and Iran first agreed to develop the Chabahar
port to ease connectivity bottlenecks for New Delhi in reaching out to
landlocked Central Asia and Afghanistan. It also follows US president Donald
Trump in August calling on India to play a larger role in stabilizing war-torn
Afghanistan as he announced a revamped security plan to defeat a resurgent
Taliban.
On Sunday, Afghan foreign minister
Salahuddin Rabbani joined his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj through a joint
video conference as the latter in New Delhi flagged off a ship carrying the
first consignment of wheat from India’s Kandla port to Afghanistan.
“The shipment is part of commitment
made by the Government of India to supply 1.1 million tonnes of wheat for the
people of Afghanistan on grant basis,” an Indian foreign ministry statement
said. “Six more wheat shipments will be sent to Afghanistan over the next few
months,” it said.
“The wheat shipment is a landmark
moment as it will pave the way for operationalisation of the Chabahar port as
an alternate, reliable and robust connectivity for Afghanistan. It will open up
new opportunities for trade and transit from and to Afghanistan and enhance
trade and commerce between the three countries (India, Iran, Afghanistan) and
the wider region,” the statement added.
It was in 2003 that India and Iran
first agreed to develop the Chabahar port, located in the Gulf of Oman near
Iran’s border with Pakistan, to allow New Delhi to reach markets in Afghanistan
and landlocked Central Asia. The project was delayed due to international
sanctions on Iran over its suspect nuclear programme and India’s focus on
concluding a civil nuclear pact with the US. Interest in the project was
rekindled in 2013 after Iran and the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany
reached an interim agreement on Tehran’s nuclear programme and some sanctions
were lifted.
And in May last year, India, Iran
and Afghanistan signed a trilateral trade pact when Prime Minister Narendra
Modi visited Tehran to enable the movement of goods from Chabahar to
Afghanistan.
The Chabahar port is also less than
100km from Pakistan’s Chinese-built port of Gwadar, which is part of the
China-Pakistan-Economic Corridor project (CPEC) aimed at opening up an energy
and trade corridor from the Gulf to western China. The CPEC is also a strand of
China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative that aims to connect around 60
countries across Asia, Africa and Europe through a series of roads, railways
and ports.
When linked to the International
North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), the Chabahar-Zahedan-Zaranj corridor
would connect South Asia on one hand and Europe on the other, Modi had said.
INSTC is an ambitious multimodal transport system established in 2000 by Iran,
Russia and India to promote transportation cooperation. It is planned to
connect the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea through Iran and
then onwards to St. Petersburg and northern Europe through Russia.
It was expected that a 2010
US-supported pact between Afghanistan and Pakistan on transit trade would be
extended to India to allow Indian goods to pass through Pakistan. But that
floundered when Pakistan refused to allow Afghan trucks to come up to the
Indian border at Attari, Punjab, or take back Indian goods. At present, Afghan
trucks with Afghan products come up to Torkham on Afghan-Pakistan border where
the goods are loaded onto Pakistan trucks that in turn come up to the
India-Pakistan border at Wagah. Once the goods are offloaded, the trucks go
back into Pakistan empty, an Indian official said.
With the US refusing to certify that
Iran was complying with its commitments under the international nuclear pact,
there were doubts that India’s plans to use Chabahar for trade with Kabul could
come under a cloud once again. Last week, however, US secretary of state Rex
Tillerson said that the US did not intend to “interfere with legitimate
business activities that are going on with other businesses, whether they be
from Europe, India, or agreements that are in place that promote economic
development and activity to the benefit of our friends and allies”.
Source : Livemint.com
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