Roundtable on Indo-Iran relation held

Islamabad : Iran had re-modified its foreign policy from the celebrated slogan of 'Neither East, Nor West' to Both East and the West,” said Dr. Lubna Asif, former Dean, National Defence University.

Prof Lubna was addressing a roundtable conference on ‘Indo-Iran relations: a reset?’ organised by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS) here.

Dr. Lubna said that Indo-Iran relations had been far from reset due to the downward trajectory of their relations since 2017. Moreover, the relations of both countries had been gleaned upon geo-economics with hardly any geopolitical factors involved.

Asif Durrani from Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) said that Iran and India had a strong hold on their cultural footprints, which had been exchanged vastly in the form of entertainment, art and craft, and textile respectively. He remarked that India was a secular state and it had installed various Persian cultural centres across the country, hence India had been a hotspot for the majority of Iranian secular inhabitants, yet in the political domain, Iran had to be vigilant of its competition with India in Afghanistan and Central Asian markets. He also envisaged that neither there would be any Northern Alliance, nor would India benefit from the Chabahar Port.

Riffat Masood, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Iran, commented that Iran’s foreign policy was based on its well-founded pragmatic values. She regarded civilisation and culture as the primary organs while religion as the second variable in Iranian society and the policy-making process. She weighed upon trade as an important pillar that governs the Indo-Iran relations but also established the declining course of trade due to the strengthening Indo-US relations.