Chabahar port a great strategic leap forward by India
By activating the first phase of the Chabahar port in Iran while China is still working on Gwadar port in Pakistan, India has once again proven that when the push comes to shove, not even the Chinese can beat Indian enterprise.
This port’s importance to Iran is evident from the fact that no less a person than Iranian President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the first phase on December 3.
Let there be no doubt that this is a great leap forward by India in this strategically important activity, affecting India, Iran and Afghanistan directly.
Taking advantage of its geographical location, Pakistan has been acting difficult with India by denying it transit land route through it for trade with landlocked Afghanistan and oil rich central Asian countries as also towards Russia and Europe.
All the Indian requests to Pakistan to allow the transit had been falling on deaf ears. Worse was the case with Afghanistan, a totally landlocked country.
The Afghan trucks were allowed only up to the AfghanPakistan Border. After that, all items to be traded with India had to be offloaded from Afghan transporters into Pakistani trucks who brought the goods to the Indian border in Punjab and then went back empty.
Needless to say, this made Afghan items costly in Indian markets. Even for regional and global trading, the only port available to Afghanistan was Karachi in Pakistan.
Here again, Pakistan was creating problems for Afghanistan.
The other equally important aspect was strategic. China is building the ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) at an investment of $46 billion in Pakistan, linking its Xinxiang province with Gwadar port in Baluchistan, located 3,000 km away, with a road and rail network and oil pipeline. This network encircles India, a matter of great strategic concern for us.
However, by opening the Chabahar port, just 85 km from Gwadar and connecting it to Afghanistan and thereafter
to Central Asian countries, India has counter-encircled Pakistan.
No wonder, the Pakistani media is very upset with this development.
The importance of the Chabahar port route, which bypasses Pakistan, can be gauged by the fact that recently India sent 110,000 tons of wheat to Afghanistan from Mumbai. It reached Afghanistan in just two days.
India and Afghanistan have already ratified the Trilateral Trade and Transit treaty involving Afghanistan, Iran and India. Iran is expected to ratify it soon.
This particular development could have taken place almost a decade back. But then the USA and European countries were hell bent on imposing sanctions on Iran on the nuclear issue.
As a result, India had to put this project in cold storage. Now even the USA is for this new Chabahar route.
This enables the USA in future to supply its troops located in Afghanistan via Chabahar, bypassing Pakistan.
There is just no doubt that opening of the Chabahar port route, bypassing Pakistan will ramp up trade between India, Iran and Afghanistan. This port will also help Afghanistan in its regional and global trade.