By Yoginder Sikand
Conference was held in Tehran on 7-8 November, 2007
Iran and India have enjoyed close civilisational links for literally thousands of years. The ancestors of many of today’s north Indian Hindus are said to have migrated from Iran in successive waves, starting several thousand years ago. Indeed, the words ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hindustan’ are themselves of Persian origin. Civilisational bonds between the two countries were further strengthened in the period of Mughal rule in India, with the migration of large numbers of Iranians to India, the use of Persian as the language of the imperial court and the impact of Persian culture on north Indian literary and artistic traditions. In modern times, India and Iran have enjoyed cordial relations, although today efforts are being made from forces outside, working directly and through local agents, to distance the two countries. It was in such a troubled context that a joint conference on Indo-Iranian relations was recently organized in Tehran, aimed at helping promote bilateral ties, at the level of governments and the peoples of both countries. The conference was jointly organised by the UNESCO Peace Chairs at the Shahid Behehsti University, Tehran, and Manipal University, India, Professor Ardeshir Amir-Arjomand and Professor Madhav Nalapat, on 7th and 8th of November 2007.
The first session of the conference was held on 7th November at the Faculty of Law of the Shahid Beheshti University. In his opening address, Prof. Madhav Nalapat of Manipal University recalled the long historical ties between Iran and India, because of which, he said, ‘Indians feel very much at home in Iran’ and vice versa. Today, there are some fourteen thousand Iranians studying in various Indian colleges and universities. The present Iranian Finance and Foreign Ministers also studied in India, he noted. Prof. Nalapat called for closer collaboration between universities in India and Iran. He lamented the fact that while there are departments of Persian in several Indian universities, there is no department of Indian Studies in any Iranian University. The only professor of Sanskrit in Iran has left the country and his department is now, for all practical purposes, defunct. Prof. Napalat pointed out that, in contrast to many other countries, there was considerable academic freedom in Iran. He remarked how the free debate that ensued in the conference contrasted with the ‘intolerable and barbaric’ treatment meted out recently to the visiting Iranian President, Ahmadinejad, by the President of Columbia University in America, where he had been invited as a guest to deliver an address but was then subjected to unprovoked abuse.
Prof. Nalapat, who was candid about his support for the close ties between India and the US [which some other Indian participants did not, however, approve of], nevertheless added that India’s relationship with Iran had to be judged in the context of Indian interests, “which were in reality not at all inconsistent with the security interests of the US”, a country ” whose people need to engage with civil society in Iran,a country that is a civilisational cousin of the Indian and European peoples”. He called for close cultural and economic ties between Iran and India. Taking cognizance of scepticism from some quarters about the future of Iran, he repeated that ‘No country can stop Iran from becoming a major power, and India should consistently work for closer relations with it’. This process could be strengthened, he suggested, if civil society groups and social activists from both countries could frequently meet and work together, and there was a “free flow of Indian and Iranian culture within each other’s boundaries”
Prof. Nalapat’s speech was followed by a lively discussion. The themes that came up for discussion included the status of minorities in both countries (which was, it was agreed, needed to be improved ), inter-community dialogue, women’s rights, democracy, economic development, and the need for a policy of peace and the avoidance of violence. Several discussants said that India must not yield to the mounting pressure on it by America to curtail or cut off relations with Iran, nor must it support any possible American attack on it.
The second session of the conference was held at the Institute of Religious and Economic Studies, a non-governmental think-tank established by a former economic advisor to the Iranian Government in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The discussion took much the same turn as in the first session. In pleading for closer people-to-people (in addition to inter-governmental) relations between Iran and India, Prof. Nalapat pointed out that the present level of trade between the two countries was still very low. While India provided some 26,000 visas to Iranian citizens last year, Iran issued only 4000 visas to Indian citizens, most of them being pilgrims to Shia shrines in that country. He pleaded for greater reciprocity, suggesting that Iran could become an important tourist destination for Indians, provided visa granting procedures were simplified and made less stringent.
Several speakers in this session pointed out that Iran needed to look East—to countries such as India and China, owing particularly to the increasingly hostile attitude of several Western powers to it. While welcoming closer economic and cultural relations with India, they expressed their anxiety over talk of India perhaps succumbing to American pressure to not go ahead with a proposed pipeline connecting the two countries. They also spoke of how religious fundamentalism and the targeting of religious minorities was a major block to further improvement of Indo-Iranian relations. They stressed the need for ‘developing’ countries like India and Iran to have a greater say in global decision-making, condemning what one of them aptly termed as a ‘one-voice world”
It was stressed that closer cultural ties and cultural exchanges could play a crucial role in further cementing relations between the two countries. It was noted that India and Iran hardly featured in each other’s media. The Indian media, it was pointed out, continues to rely heavily on Western sources for news abut Iran, which is heavily biased, one-sided and sensational. It presents only the negative (real or imagined) side of Iran, providing a very distorted image of the country. India was once a great bastion of Persian literature and culture, but this tradition is now almost dead in the country, it was lamented. Iranian speakers pointed out that Indian films are widely watched in Iran, because of which most Iranians are familiar with at least some aspects of contemporary India, this being in contrast to the almost total ignorance on the part of most Indians about Iran today. On the other hand, it was pointed out, that while there are presently three official Iranian cultural centres in India—in New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad—India has yet to be given permission to open an Indian cultural centre in Iran, despite repeated requests.
The third and final session of the conference was held at the Baran Institute, a think-tank run by the former President of Iran, Khatami. In his speech, Prof. Nalapat mooted the idea of a strategic ‘triangle’ consisting of Iran, India and Indonesia. He argued that although the Khatami regime had sought to move Iran closer to the West, it had been rudely rebuffed. Hence, he said, there was an urgent need for Iran to ‘look East’ instead. Mr. Yaqubi, a former Iranian Ambassador to India, also concurred with this plea. A former deputy foreign minister of Iran, who was present at the meeting, talked about Iran’s multi-layered civilization, which includes the pre-Islamic, the Islamic and the ‘modern’. ‘Modernity’, however, does not mean, he argued, that one should blindly follow the Western path and abandon one’s own cultural heritage, which is what strategic planners in the West advocate. True global democracy, he said, must be based on the ‘rich global multi-cultural fabric’. He critiqued what he saw as Western hypocrisy on the question of human rights and democracy and its willingness to support dictatorial regimes in order to promote its own strategic interests. He condemned all forms of religious fundamentalism, and announced Iran’s opposition to groups like the Taliban, al-Qaeda and militant Wahhabism, which, he pointed out, have been abetted consistently by America. He spoke about the grave threat of America using militant Wahhabis, as in Iraq, for its own purposes, at the same time as he condemned the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Indian participants concurred that sovereinity in both countries needed to be restored,and a few expressed anguish at the “League of Nations” style mandates that have been given by the UN Security Council to some countries now occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,besides other locations,and said that such a transfer of sovereign power to an occupying force was unwelcome .
This was the second conference of its sort, the first having been hosted by the UNESCO Peace Chair of Manipal University last year. Participants stressed the need to continue with this form of parallel diplomacy to strengthen people-to-people contacts between India and Iran, although it was also felt that such meetings must plan for practical outcomes, rather than remaining limited just to discussions. It was agreed that a road map for closer ties between the Iranian and Indian peoples would be drawn up.The next conference would take place in 2008 in India.