NEW DELHI, 27 September 2005 — India yesterday defended its decision to vote for a resolution against Iran on the nuclear issue, saying that its diplomacy had in fact helped avert a “major international confrontation” between Tehran and the international community.
“Our main objective was to prevent an immediate referral of the Iran case to the UN Security Council and to head off a confrontation of Iran with the international community,” Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said at a press conference here in a bid to counter increasingly vocal criticism about capitulating to US pressure.
“We have all along been aware of the US position on the Iran issue. The US wanted an immediate referral of Iran to the council but it was because of our diplomacy that the EU-3 agreed to water down the resolution to provide more time and space for negotiations before taking a decision on the issue,” Saran said, while alluding to hectic behind-the-scenes diplomacy by India.
“We succeeded in our efforts. Most countries, including the US, eventually came around to our view.”
“If there was an immediate referral to the council, it would have been a major setback to Iran,” Saran stressed.
Asked why India didn’t abstain from the vote in view of serious reservations it had about various aspects of the draft resolution, Saran said: “We were trying to find a way out of confrontation by resolving the issue through dialogue and consensus. We argued with the EU negotiators that Iran should be given more time, especially in view of a new government in Tehran, to come back to the negotiating table.
“Secondly, we insisted that there should be no immediate referral of the Iran issue to the Security Council. As the EU-3 agreed to take our demands on board, it would not have been correct to abstain,” he added.
Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee asserted yesterday that it was at India’s insistence that the board of governors of the IAEA had decided to postpone the issue of referral to the council at its next meeting in November.
“We took a stand that Iran should be given more time for peaceful resolution of the issue. The issue should not be sent to the Security Council ...but to the board of IAEA,” he said on the sidelines of National Expo of Small Agro and Rural Industries here. “What we wanted has been taken care of,” he added.
Rebutting charges of betraying the Non-Aligned Movement and developing countries by taking side of the West over a sensitive issue, Saran asserted India’s independent foreign policy credentials. “We are not aligned with the left or the right, or with this bloc or that bloc. We took the decision on the basis of an objective assessment of our national interest,” Saran said.
India Saturday voted for the EU-3 resolution sponsored by Britain, France and Germany in the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that accused Iran of “its many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT safeguards agreement.”
The resolution paves the way for Iran to be reported to the UN Security Council if it fails to satisfy the IAEA of its sincerity in addressing concerns about nuclear activities that might be used for developing atomic weapons.
India’s Vienna vote has sparked a war of words with the left parties — partners of the ruling United Progressive Alliance — and the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Sunday slamming the vote as a betrayal of basic principles of India’s foreign policy.
“The Manmohan Singh government has caved in to US pressure and gone back on its stated stand,” the CPI-M politburo said in a statement. The Communist Party of India called it “a letdown of a friendly country.”
Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha went one step further and charged that the UPA government had made India a “client state” of the US.
This sustained onslaught predictably put the UPA government on the defensive. “We were trying to help Iran as much as possible. We enjoy close and cordial relations with Iran and support Tehran’s pursuit of peaceful nuclear energy within global nonproliferation norms,” Saran clarified and expressed confidence that it won’t have any impact on its blossoming ties with Iran and that the issue is resolved within the IAEA.
“There should be no apprehension about India’s vote having an impact on our energy security with Iran,” he said. “As long as the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline is economically viable, there should be no problem with it.”
The Iranian government has yet to officially react to the Indian vote, but leading newspapers in Iran have reacted angrily to the resolution with one leading daily calling for the country to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
