ISLAMABAD - Iran had re-modified its foreign policy from the celebrated slogan of ‘neither east, nor west’ to ‘both east and the west,’ said Prof. Dr Lubna Asif, former Dean at National Defense University (NDU). She was addressing a roundtable conference, titled ‘Indo-Iran Relations: A Reset?’ organised by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS), here on Tuesday. She said that Indo-Iran relations had been far from reset, due to the downward trajectory of their relations since 2017. Moreover, the relations of both countries had been gleaned upon geoeconomics, with hardly any geopolitical factors involved.
Ambassador Asif Durrani, Senior Research Fellow at Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) examined the Indo-Iran relations from the prism of cultural exchange. He said that Iran and India had strong hold on their cultural footprints, which had been exchanged vastly, in the form of entertainment, art and craft and textile respectively. He remarked that India was a secular state and it had installed various Persian cultural centres across the country, hence India had been a hotspot for majority of Iranian secular inhabitants, yet in the political domain, Iran had to be vigilant of its competition with India in Afghanistan and Central Asian markets. Ambassador Durrani also envisaged that neither there would be any northern alliance, nor would India benefit from the Chabahar Port.
Ambassador Riffat Masood, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Iran commented that Iran’s foreign policy was based on its well-founded pragmatic values. She regarded civilization and culture as the primary organs, while religion; as the secondary variable in Iranian society and policy making process. She weighed upon the trade; as an important pillar that governs the Indo-Iran relations, but also established the declining course of trade due to the strengthening Indo-US relations, henceforth, China had been filling the vacuum of India in Iran