- 5 hours ago
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Talk to us about the stakes for India in this war on Iran.
00:08Look, GCC is a very important trading partner for India.
00:12It's the largest trading partner, $178 billion worth of trade last year.
00:16We have 10 million people in the region.
00:19Their remittances are one third of the total remittances that India gets.
00:24And of course, there is a question of energy security.
00:26And while the bulk of Indian imports are from the Gulf, and especially after the U.S. has put the
00:31pressure and said we cannot import oil from Russia, the dependence on the Gulf becomes greater.
00:37So as a result, for India, Indian economy, it's extremely important that there is stability there.
00:44Already, there's pressure to repatriate the Indians.
00:47It will be impossible to bring 10 million people back.
00:50There's a rush of people getting out of these countries.
00:53So the longer the conflict continues, the more complicated the situation gets for India.
01:00How vulnerable is India's energy security right now?
01:04How would you describe it?
01:07Well, I think we built up sufficient reserves.
01:10So according to the Petroleum Minister, we have enough for maybe two months, a month and a half.
01:16We would, I have no doubt, India will have to go back to importing Russian oil and tell the U
01:22.S. that thanks to them for what is happening in the Gulf.
01:25We can't just not import oil from Russia.
01:28So we'll have to start looking at other sources.
01:31I'm sure they are talking to all these countries at the moment.
01:35But the hope is that this will probably not continue beyond a certain point.
01:40Although at the moment it's become a war of attrition, there is a miscalculation, I think, on the part of
01:46U.S. and Israel,
01:47thinking that if they take out the supreme leader, the regime will tumble and there will be cracks and popular
01:53uprising will take place.
01:54That's not happened.
01:55There is a transition in the leadership that has happened.
01:58We'll also see a new supreme leader being named.
02:02And I think what the former supreme leader has done is he's created layers of succession.
02:07He knew that they will take it out.
02:09It happened in case of Hezbollah.
02:11Israel took out a series of leaders who succeeded the previously killed one.
02:15So Iran's prepared for it.
02:17And they've also delegated, I think, authority to the operational levels of the army that even if the command and
02:25control is interrupted, those ones will go on acting.
02:28But I think what complicates it further is the attacks by Iran on the GCC countries.
02:34Now, India could do a better balancing if it was just Israel, U.S. versus Iran.
02:40But especially the attack on civilian, on hotels, on civilian buildings, even though they may have been, according to Iran,
02:50U.S. or CIA or Mossad sources there, that complicates it.
02:58Ambassador, you already suggested that succession plans are already in place for Iran.
03:05We just had the U.S. CENTCOM posting an act suggesting that the U.S. forces have destroyed Islamic Revolutionary
03:14Command and also control facilities as well as the Iranian air.
03:18What do you make of that?
03:20How significant is that in the context of what you have just shared with us?
03:25You see, the U.S. are fighting a conventional war.
03:28They're taking out, and I think the Iranians are much better prepared after the confrontation in June last.
03:35At that point, they were taken by surprise.
03:37They took a long time to retaliate.
03:39So they've got underground facilities.
03:42They've got domestic capability to produce more drones.
03:46And I think what's happening is the asymmetry between what they spend on their drones and their missiles and what
03:54the countries they are targeting are spending on their counter-missile facilities.
03:59A $4 million missile is fired by, say, UAE or Qatar to stop maybe a $10,000 drone.
04:06So there is this asymmetry because of which Iran's prepared for it.
04:11And so far, it appears that they have enough stock to carry on.
04:15And that's why Ali Larijani, the head of the national security, he has said that we were approached by the
04:23Americans to have ceasefire.
04:25We are not accepting it.
04:26I think they want to drag it on, punish Israel, do as much of bombing of Israel as they can.
04:32They have been penetrating the Iron Dome and raise the cost and regionalize the war, which means increase the price
04:40of oil.
04:41Now with what?
04:43In the U.S. also, it will be just six or seven months left to the midterms.
04:46And as you were discussing earlier, the shadow on a very important summit between President Xi and President Trump.
04:53President Trump has been putting a lot of weight on that.
04:55Now, the shadow will be there on that.
04:58Although the Chinese have also called up the Iranians and said don't attack the GCC countries because even they are
05:05finding it difficult to support Iran in all that Iran is doing to regionalize the war.
05:11That is not helping anyone.
05:14A lot is at stake for India, but it goes beyond energy security.
05:20We know that the economy is also at stake with a lot of Indians possibly going back home.
05:25Remittances may get hit.
05:27Talk to us about the implications in the economy.
05:29What are the biggest risks here?
05:32No, one is, of course, as a trading partner.
05:34As I said, it's the largest trading block India had, $178 billion worth of trade.
05:40And then Dubai is a major antropor.
05:42A lot of trade goes there and then it's sent off even to Pakistan.
05:47Quite a bit of India's trade.
05:49India may not be on talking terms with Pakistan, but a lot of goods are traded via Dubai.
05:54And then Dubai also becomes, through Dubai, things go to Central Asia.
05:59It goes to the rest of West Asia.
06:02So it's a very important trading hub for India.
06:05And, of course, there are 10 million people sending one third of India's over $100 billion worth of remittances annually,
06:12which helps us with balancing of payments because we have a deficit there.
06:18And especially with the Gulf, because we are importing much more oil, then we are able to send products and
06:23goods to the Gulf.
06:25So it becomes very difficult to replace it.
06:29And then there is a question of panic.
06:31If out of 10 million people, even 100,000 people come back and bulk of them, about a third of
06:36them are from Kerala, the southern state of Kerala.
06:39And Kerala is also going to elections and BJP, the ruling party, is making a bid for power there.
06:45Now, if a lot of people of Kerala come back, that's going to be very negative for the government in
06:50Delhi because people will say, look, you couldn't help us.
06:54We've lost our jobs.
06:55So it has domestic implications in India.
06:58It has trading implications, foreign exchange implications, and, of course, energy because of the price of oil going up.
07:07Might there be a backlash against Promisor Modi, given his visit to Israel just 24 hours earlier?
07:18Look, I think what he's done by doing that is it's been the domestic policy does not it doesn't count
07:25on the Muslim votes.
07:27There's a very important election in West Bengal and polarizing the votes has been important for the BJP and it
07:34does not harm them.
07:36If anything, it helps them because they are not counting on the Muslim vote.
07:39They're counting on the consolidation of the non-Muslim vote.
07:42But, yes, it does affect what is seen as India's autonomy since 1947, although it is a fact.
07:51In 1971, we did sign an accord with the Soviet Union, which was as close as an accord could bring
07:59us to the Soviet Union.
08:01This is before we fought the war with Pakistan and created Bangladesh.
08:04We needed one of the superpowers with us.
08:07So we did have a very close alliance with the Soviet Union at that stage.
08:10So we can't say that shifting, tilting towards U.S. has done something new.
08:17But, yes, it does for the last at least two, three decades.
08:21Although we've tried to get very close to the U.S. and to Israel, but completely being in one corner
08:29or appearing to be in one corner becomes very difficult to market then within India.
08:34It's been used today.
08:35This is Sonia Gandhi, who's, you know, the prominent leader of the Congress Party.
08:40She's written in OPEC, criticizing it in one of the newspapers, that this is shifting India from its traditional foreign
08:47policy stance of being neutral.
08:50And the only advantage in being neutral is that then you can play a role.
08:54At the moment, India cannot play any role in stopping the violence in the Gulf.
09:00We can only be a spectator or ring up countries which are getting harmed, etc.
09:06There are already ramifications at home.
09:08We know that the war against Iran has sparked protests in Jammu, in Kashmir, in India.
09:15Is there reason to be concerned about that?
09:18Yes, about 15 percent of the almost 200 million Muslims in India are Shias.
09:24And they're concentrated in a few major towns, Hyderabad, Lucknow.
09:29And that is why Prime Minister Wajpayee, who used to fight from Lucknow, he was also a BJP member, paid
09:34a lot of attention to Iran, although the geopolitics then was different.
09:38India and Iran at the beginning of this century were working closely to oppose the Taliban, rise of Taliban in
09:46Afghanistan and what Pakistan was doing in Afghanistan.
09:49Prime Minister Modi visited Tehran and then the president of Iran was a chief guest at a Republic Day celebration
09:59the following year.
09:59That was as close as India and Iran got.
10:02But once, of course, the nuclear discussions began with the West, we had to create a separation.
10:08And then, of course, that's a different story.
10:11But, yes, it has implications because the Shias tend to vote for BJP.
10:16They don't vote along the Sunnis.
10:18And that's a vote that BJP has had in crucial states like Uttar Pradesh.
10:23And so now how they will vote hereafter, we don't know.
10:26But there would be implications.
10:29Ambassador, it is quite clear that Iran is important to India's economy.
10:35Is it surprising then that Prime Minister Modi has not yet responded officially to the death of the Supreme Leader?
10:44A foreign minister has called up the foreign minister.
10:47Yes, it's it's it's you can say that it could have been done differently.
10:53But India at the moment is a very crucial point of negotiating a trade deal with the U.S.
10:59The U.S. is extremely important to us.
11:02And at this particular point, I think the government shows that the benefit of appearing this way is more than
11:10the the damage that can happen if we do overbalancing at this stage.
11:16But personally speaking, I would have liked, you know, to remain a little balanced and certainly on the on the
11:21killing of Lida, breaching of the sovereignty of Iran.
11:25And as it is, Secretary of State Mario Marco Rubio couldn't explain very well why U.S. entered the war.
11:31He came out with a very convoluted kind of argument.
11:35We anticipated that they would attack Israel and therefore in anticipation we attacked is not a very good argument.
11:41And if the aim was change of regime, because already the dialogue was on between USA, I think it was
11:49probably a bit taken by surprise.
11:52The gamble probably that maybe the dialogue will succeed.
11:55But yes, it's positioned India in a manner that will take to take some effort even after normalcy returns to
12:03reestablish again confidence between India and Iran.
12:09And do you think India can actually maintain neutrality as it protects its interests in the Gulf?
12:17Well, it seems the more the way the world is complicated today and the disruption in the global order, probably
12:25neutrality, neutrality is a will prove expensive.
12:29And that's why neutrality is not that possible.
12:32Therefore, I think there will have to be transactional arrangements and opportunism.
12:36That is going to be the hallmark all over the world of how countries deal with an evolving and splintered
12:43world.
Comments