Signs the Security Council is changing India
Sumit Ganguly sees evidence that India is shifting its stance on Iran–in a more hawkish direction. Pressure from Washington is clearly important, but he attributes at least part of the change to India’s Security Council aspirations and its desire to present itself as a responsible international stakeholder: This week, the Reserve Bank of India, India’s ...
Sumit Ganguly sees evidence that India is shifting its stance on Iran--in a more hawkish direction. Pressure from Washington is clearly important, but he attributes at least part of the change to India's Security Council aspirations and its desire to present itself as a responsible international stakeholder:
Sumit Ganguly sees evidence that India is shifting its stance on Iran–in a more hawkish direction. Pressure from Washington is clearly important, but he attributes at least part of the change to India’s Security Council aspirations and its desire to present itself as a responsible international stakeholder:
This week, the Reserve Bank of India, India’s central bank, issued explicit guidelines indicating that Indian companies would no longer be allowed to use the Asian Clearing Union, a regional clearinghouse, for financial transactions with Iranian companies. This decision, in the language of international relations, constitutes a costly signal. It entails significant costs because India and Iran have gas and oil trade to the tune of $11 billion annually.
It’s also costly in other ways. The government will also pay significant political costs because the opposition in parliament — and especially the Communist parties — will now seize upon it as further evidence of the ruling United Progressive Alliance genuflecting before US pressure. There is, of course, no doubt that the Obama administration had long made it clear that it would prefer to see India distance itself from Iran and join the sanctions bandwagon.
However, it’s not certain that American pressure alone contributed to this decision. Apart from Khamenei’s remark on Kashmir, the Indians have other reasons to express their displeasure with the Iranian regime.
India is on the verge of joining the UN Security Council after nearly a two decade hiatus, and choosing an option that entails significant economic and political costs is yet another way of signaling to the global community that it is prepared to bear new and painful burdens as it competes for an eventual permanent seat on the Council.
Trying to game the Security Council reform process is tricky though; too much ardor on Iran may make Moscow and Beijing worry that India will become just another part of the liberal Western bloc on the Council that they’ve so often resisted. And if they start to feel that way, Russia and China probably wouldn’t hesitate to torpedo India’s candidacy.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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