The recent visit of Iranian President Syed Mohammed Khatami to India, where he was the chief guest at India's Republic Day celebrations on January 26 in New Delhi, highlights the growing warmth in relations between the two countries in a fast changing strategic international environment.
Before Ayatollah Khomeini's Shi'ite revolution, which shook the world in 1979, India's relations with the Shah of Iran, a Cold War ally of the West and Pakistan, had fluctuated from correct to cool, sometimes becoming even acrimonious. During India's wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, Iran helped the latter with military hardware.
At a time when this writer took a delegation to Tehran and Iran's industrial centers in 1977 to discuss the country's need for Indian engineers, skilled workers and doctors for a fast expanding economy and social services as a result of the October 1973 four-fold increase in oil prices, multinational chiefs used to line the skiing slopes of St Moritz to show off their wares to Iran's Reza Shah Pahlavi on vacation. How the world has changed in the past 25 years.
While world leaders such as South Africa's Nelson Mandela and Algerian President Aziz Bouteflika have graced Indian Republic Day celebrations in recent years, Khatami was the first leader from the Gulf to be so honored, although Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani visited India in late 1995.
Khatami, unlike many other Gulf rulers, is moderate, well read and modern in his world view, a reason for his re-election last year and for a thumping victory in the 1997 elections. The majority of the Iranian electorate, especially the young and women, clearly feel stifled by the stranglehold of the conservative mullahs on power.
Khatami received a warm welcome from eclectic Indian president A P J Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the latter with memories of a similar welcome he was accorded in Iran a few years ago. On January 25, Khatami and Vajpayee signed the "New Delhi Declaration" which identifies the main areas of bilateral cooperation. Six agreements covering economic, scientific, info-tech, educational and training cooperation were also signed. The two leaders in addition signed a statement calling for a peaceful resolution of the Iraq crisis under UN auspices.
On Kashmir, a sensitive issue and litmus test for India, mindful of a statement made by an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran that the issue should be resolved within the framework of the United Nations resolutions, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi contended that it was a misquote. "It is true that there are resolutions adopted by the UN, but basically this issue has to be resolved through direct talks between India and Pakistan. We have no role there and we do not wish to compound the issue."
Khatami advised Indian Muslims to "participate actively in the progress and development of the land they live in". They "should also help contain extremism and communal tension". On the whole, Shi'ite Muslims appear to give less trouble in India compared to Sunnis, who suffer from manipulation with money and other inducements by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others.
During his visit to Hyderabad, fast becoming another hub of Indian information technology, Khatami said that Iran had the potential to become a flourishing market for Indian IT goods. Iran also "had a huge bank of young and creative talent and a large number of extremely active and efficient companies and institutions already functioning there", he said.
It is true though that IT cooperation could be mutually beneficial if more Urdu/Persian script-based IT programs were created for general use. Urdu still remains the mother tongue of many tens of millions in India. India has made considerable progress, and entrepreneurs from the two countries could join hands in this.
For Iran, cooperation with India remains its best bet for progress in computers and IT as the US is unlikely to give any assistance in this sector. Hyderabad has a large Iranian population, many of whom have lived there for generations, it has an Iranian consulate and Iranians run scores of hotel and bakery businesses.
Numbering perhaps 25 million, India has the second largest Shi'ite population in the world. Oudh, Bijapur, Ahmednagar and Golconda were its kingdoms in the past. Shi'ites are now concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Ismaili Khojas in Mumbai. (Incidentally, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was an Ismaili Bohra).
While trade between India and Iran has risen from $120 million in 1991 to $500 million in 2002, the potential is much greater. Iran's easy access to Central Asia and Europe and the conclusion of a transit agreement on a North-South corridor between India, Russia and Iran should give impetus to more trade and opportunities for joint projects and investment. Iran has nearly 9 percent of the world's oil reserves and 15 percent of the known gas reserves, while India, with a billion-plus population, is deficient in this raw material for its petro-chemical and fertilizer industries, apart from its use as an energy source.
Khatami observed that India was "one of our best customers". But only the creation of a free trade bloc or an economic community for South and Central Asia will be able to usher in prosperity for the region, as have the European Union and ASEAN for their members. Such a bloc would help change the agendas in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere from the opium cultivation and heroin refining of a Kalashnikov culture to the creation of a crossroad for trade, oil and gas pipelines.
The US, though, remains a major constraint in India drawing closer to Iran. It forced India to renege on its promise to build an experimental nuclear reactor in Iran - Russia subsequently moved in. It has classified Iran as part of an axis of evil, along with North Korea and Iraq (which has been a supporter of India on Kashmir, but India is not fully supporting Iraq so as not to displease the Americans). It may be recalled that when now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joined the US administration, relying on past memories, he even bracketed India with North Korea as a rogue state.
After the Shi'ite-Sunni split following the Iranian revolution, it was natural that Iran would move away from Sunni-dominated Pakistan (where Shi'ites and Sunnis engage in regular secular violence). It took some time to sheathe the excesses of revolution in Iran (even then, Iranian mullahs were pleading with Indian doctors to stay on in the country). When US energy interests were playing their games of coddling up to the Taliban, Russia, Iran and India were the major supporters of the opposition Northern Alliance, even when it was reduced to only a pocket of resistance in Afghanistan.
Then September 11 happened. The US learned to its dismay that the fundamentalist tiger it had fed and nursed against the USSR had grown into a Frankenstein monster and was behind the stunning events. The current administration in Kabul, in which the Northern Alliance has a major say, has created a situation where Delhi and Tehran can jointly work on projects towards rebuilding the war-ravaged nation.
But it will depend largely on the US. Washington has not been happy at India's expansion of consular offices, because Pakistan, which the US still needs, looks askance at the return of Indian influence in Afghanistan. Traditionally, Afghanistan and India have had close relations, except during the Taliban regime of the latter half of the 1990s.
The glitter of Tehran during this writer's 1977 visit amid booming industrial construction, with its streets clogged with cars and flush with hustlers, turned out to be the boom before the big bang and the bust - the Ayatollah Khomeini-led Islamic revolution, which made the world sit up and take note of the cataclysmic stage in the evolution of the Shi'ite sect of Islam, which unlike the main Sunni stream had kept open the ijtihad interpretation of Sharia law to meet new situations. Most people in the West did not even know the difference between a Shi'ite and a Sunni and the historical enmity between them.
Old linkages between India and Iran
India's linkages and relations with Iran are ancient and almost umbilical. Not far from Iran's western border, around the junction of Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, a chariot-riding Indian-Iranian military aristocracy, embedded among indigenous Hurrians, ruled its Mitanni kingdom between 1500 BC to 1200 BC. It used pre-Vedic Sanskrit phrases, worshipped common Daivya and Assura gods like Indira, Nasatya and Varuna, Mithra. The Mitannis had apparently separated from the main Aryan body, which after many centuries in the region of Amu and Syr Darya had moved on to Iran. Then after some acrimony there was a split into factions: Vedic with Daivya gods and Avestan with Assura gods, with the Vedic stream going on to the land of Sapt Sindhu, ie northwest India and beyond. On a theory based on linguistic, cultural, religious and other similarities, Iranian and Indian Aryans are, if not racial cousins, at least linguistic and cultural ones.
During the Muslim rule, Persians came as bureaucrats with the Turkish rulers in India and left a deep influence on Indian culture, civilization and languages; Hindustani, Urdu and Hindi. From Akbar's time, the Persians formed the majority of the Muslim Amir ul Umra, that is, courtiers and civil servants. To get in with Persian and its derivative Urdu as the language of the court and administration (even during the British era), even the Hindus took on some of their traits, like Moghului cuisine (Persian cuisine is the mother of most cuisines, except French and Chinese) and meat eating. Also adopted were a love of music and dance. Kayastahs dominated the civil services during the British rule.
Iran: A cradle of civilizations
Situated at the crossroads and itself a cradle of many great civilizations, Iran has exercised great civilizing influence since ancient times. Whosoever (King of Kings, Sahanshah in Darius's words, its Hindu equivalent being Maharajdhiraj) ruled what now constitutes Iran, they exercised great political and cultural influence not only in the neighborhood but also in far-off places.
During the classical Greek political and social evolution in western Asia Minor which Turkey was then called, the Persian Achaemenid dynasty had its satrapies and outposts on the Aegean coast, known as Ionia, from which the word Yunan for Greece entered the eastern lexicon. In 517 BC it was Persian Emperor Darius who ordered Scylax, his Greek subject from Caria (western Turkey) to survey the river Indus from Peshawar to its exit into the sea, part of his empire. And for the first time, the West became acquainted with India. Herodotus's chapters on Indian history were based on records of that exploration.
The Persians routinely crossed over to European Thrace and a Greek victory over the Persians in 490 BC at Marathon, perhaps the first of the West over the East, is still commemorated as an athletic event in the Olympics (showing Western bias in sports). The Trojan war of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was a small event militarily and a storm in tea cup. Troy was a marginal appendage of the huge Hittite empire in Asia Minor ruled from Bogazkoy, northeast of Ankara.
Later, even in defeat, the Persians civilized Alexander the Great and his Macedonian and Greek hordes, introduced the small town boys to the protocol, trappings and grandeur of an imperial power and implanted the strongly held belief in the divine right of the kings, later adopted by Alexander's military commanders and successors. On these beliefs were laid the foundations of the structure for the Roman and Byzantine empires. The Islamic Omayyed Caliphate in Damascus and later the Abbassid Caliphate in Baghdad also borrowed from the same state structures and ceremonies. Up to the 7th century, the Persians disputed with the Romans control of Asia Minor and Syria, which exhausted them both, making them easy prey for the Muslim Arabs. Persians then acted as a civilizing sieve to nomad Turks, Mongols and others from the horse-riding nurseries of the Eurasian steppes who played such havoc for centuries in Asia and Europe alike. Whoever ruled Persia, Seljuk rulers in Anatolia (Turkey) or even Delhi's Turkish Sultans and early Moghuls, for them the Iranians were the bureaucrats without equal.
Persia's conversion to Islam, which forced Zoroastrian Parsees to migrate to India in the 7th century, disrupted mutual interaction and enrichment of Indian and Persian social and cultural streams in place since Achemenean days, if not earlier. It isolated and weakened Hindustan, when the likes of Ghajnavi, Nadir Shah and Abdali could raid Hindustan with impunity.
But Islam did not liberate the sophisticated and evolved Persians, deeply influenced by spiritual and speculative Avestan, its excessive rituals and love for the intoxicant soma having been curbed earlier by Zoroaster's reforms (Buddhism was a similar attempt against Brahmanical rituals and excesses in India around the same time). Then the Persians lost their language, Pehlavi, which emerged a few centuries later as Persian in modified Arabic script. Having been ruled by Arabs, Turks, Mongols and Tartars for eight-and-half centuries, there emerged the Sufi-origin Persian Safavids, who became finally masters of their own land, which more or less comprises present-day Iran. At the same time, to preserve their sect and survive, Iranians after centuries of foreign rule developed an uncanny ability not to bring to their lips what is on their minds, and have institutionalized it as takiyya, ie dissimulation.
They had modified simple Arab Islam into a more sophisticated and innovative Shi'ite branch, with the direct descent of Imam Ali's progeny from Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Mohammed, echoing their deeply ingrained sense of the divinity of rulers. They strengthened (against the Arab caliphs and Turkish sultans) the status of the imams, who among more egalitarian Sunnis are no more than prayer leaders, in line with the Indian-Iranian tradition of placing priests higher than rulers (as are Brahmins in the Indian caste system). By tradition, Azeri (Turkish) speaking Iranians become chiefs of the armed forces. Ayatollah Khomeini was an Azeri speaking Iranian.
The status of the imam evolved into the doctrines of intercession and infallibility, ie, of the faqih/mutjahid. (Somewhat like Hindu shankracharyas and the fraternity of learned pandits). The speculative Aryan mind fused the mystic traditions into Sufi Islam, bringing out the best in Islamic mysticism and softening the rigors of austere and crusading Islam which had emerged from the barren sands of Arabia. There were unparalleled contributions by Rumi, Hafij, Attar, El-Ghazali, Firdaus, Nizami, El-Beruni, Omar Khayyam and others to Islamic philosophy and civilization. Their answer to interminable Islamic theological arguments on free will v predetermination was that the opposites were the obverse and reverse sides of the divine mind, similar to the concepts in Hindu philosophy. Hindustani poetry, music, painting and architecture owe much to their Iranian cousins. Sufis played more than an equal role in the conversion to Islam of India as did the sword or material inducements. Sufi pirs are still as revered as Hindu or Sikh holy men in India.
From Shi'ite variants like the Ismailis emerged the "assassins" from the mountain vastness of Iran and later Syria, representing an individuals' ultimate and sublime sacrifice for a cause (or his master) against the tyranny of the absolute or collective power of the caliphs and sultans, inspired by Imam Hussein's martyrdom. The assassin's modern-day versions, the suicide bombers of the Hizbollah, Hamas, Sikh or Tamil Tiger, have become the terrors of mankind.
The Iranian hostage-taking of US diplomats certainly tilted the 1980 elections against US president Jimmy Carter, who was made to look impotent. It left a visceral desire for revenge, like against Vietnam and its ally Russia, after its humiliation. The poor Iraqis paid for this in the 1991 war - as much was said by George Bush Sr. US policies and relations with Iran are still biased by that skewed experience.
After the unraveling of the USSR, both the US and Russia were worried about Iranian machinations in the newly-independent Central Asian states, as were their new rulers, the former communists turned "democrats".
With a population of over 65 million, just a fourth India's size in area and strategically located, Iran's reach to influence regional and world events remains as durable as ever. But Iranians, now an ethnic mix, may not easily stand the test of territorial and linguistic loyalty. Only half speak Persian, a quarter, like Kurds etc, allied languages, the rest mostly Turkic Azeri. Iran has twice the number Azeri speakers as Azerbaijan. It has one fourth the number of Turkomens compared to Turkmenistan. Then there are Arabs and others, even Dravidian Brahui-speaking Balochis.
Iran has many worries of its own, with Islam, perhaps, a major cementing factor, which must be guarded and strengthened to maintain its unity. The excesses of the Khomeini regime, which stunned the West in the early 1980s, now pale in comparison with what the Sunni Algerians are still doing to each other, what the Taliban did in Afghanistan, the Sudanese to their Christians in the south, apart from killings between Sunnis, Shi'ites, Mohajirs and others in Pakistan.
The Khomeini revolution
From the beginning, not all Iranians fully supported the Islamic revolution (in which skillful use was made of Karbala - where Imam Hussein and his army and family fought and died for Islam - and other Shi'ite imagery), its agenda and implementation. Khomeini was a rallying point for all against the Shah (caricatured as the sultan or the caliph), the corroding corruption, the excesses of the Savak secret police and its backers, the CIA, the hopes and aspirations of the youth for social justice, the masses suffering from inflation and sudden oil wealth inequities.
Khomeini provided that unflinching moral and spiritual bulwark against the Shah's armed-to-the-teeth military machine and his capacity to deny whatever concessions were demanded, and what was held out in the end was too little too late. Many Iranians who opposed the hardline clerics and their killjoy agenda were eliminated, forced to flee or went underground. Even in 1980, disenchanted, only one fourth of Iranians went to the parliamentary polls. Expectedly, not all clerics, some even senior to Khomeini, like Shariatmadari, favored political parties and more freedoms. But by sheer force, the radical conservatives took over power, sometimes in spite of Khomeini.
Then the Iranians laid low and dissimulated. When the big chance came in May 1997, they voted massively in favor of Syed Mohammed Khatami. He started slowly but surely implementing his agenda, like appointing a woman vice president. But the radical conservative elements would not give in. When elected, Khatami was called a man with an aura around him and a twinkle in his eyes, but some of that aura has been eroded by the mullahs, who still maintain their control over the levers of power in the judiciary and the higher Islamic councils, and they can bring out religious goons to intimidate students and others. And in spite of moderates being in the majority in the majlis (parliament), the country has failed in relaxing the stranglehold of the conservatives.
The situation has not been made easier by US policies. The radicals accuse the moderates and modernizers of being pro-US or its puppets. Iran did make many moves to ease relations with the US, with Khatami calling for a dialogue between civilizations. But after September 11, in spite of Iran's limited support to the US in its war in Afghanistan, the US now has its eyes fixed on Saddam Hussein and a regime change in Iraq. The US is having serious problems with North Korea, and Iran still remains the other member of the axis of evil. A US war on Iraq will involve the presence of massive numbers of US troops in the region, most likely on a long-term basis.
The US was vehemently opposed by Iran even in 1990-91. So there is a critical need now for all Iranians to remain united, which would of course work in favor the status quo, ie the mullahs in control. But as and when change comes, most experts forecast an incremental soft landing. However, violence should not be ruled out. It is a part of the Islamic history and psyche, specially of Shi'ites. Through ceremonies of martyrdom and funeral, recalling Karbala, the tactics used against the Shah could be repeated.
In the final analysis, what has the post-revolution period brought to the Iranian masses? Suffocating social curbs, little freedom and dwindling living standards in an oil-rich country. It has been made worse by a moribund US policy of embargo (to manipulate oil prices for its allies and to keep Israel the strongest power in the region) and isolation, to teach Iranians a lesson.
Can the Iranian soul, after all this, undergo a cathartic and cataclysmic rebirth, liberate itself further and give a contemporary meaning to its Islamic-molded psyche which could serve as an example to other Muslims. For, in an overall war between conservative Islam and modernism, not necessarily of the Western type, the Iranian conflict is one of the major battles, and a very vital one, being waged all over the Islamic world and elsewhere, through revolutions and evolutions, spread in time and space over large areas.
But the Muslim ummah, which agrees on little, at different stages of tribal, social, political and economic development, is now watching, almost helplessly, the unfolding of US war preparations against Iraq, an ancient center of Islamic culture and civilization, in the heart of the Islamic world, next to the sacred soil of Arabia. Add to this the US's avowed declarations of bringing democracy to the ummah, and convulsions await the Islamic world.
No one knows how and which way the camel will sit.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies.
