Before Partition, the town of Chabahar (earlier known as Tiz) was right at India’s doorstep, situated in Iran’s Sistan Baluchistan province where the Panchatantra was once read in Persian (entitled ‘Kalileh-wa-Dimna’), and Hindustani Urdu is understood and spoken commonly. But ties between independent India and Iran, before the 1979 revolution, were never very close, given the Shah’s U.S.-tilt, and India’s Non-Alignment push. In 1970, it was the Shah who first conceived of developing Chabahar (he even planned a U.S. submarine base there), given its salubrious weather and the fact that the warm-water port was Iran’s only such foothold in the Indian Ocean, strategically located just between the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz.
In 1993, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao travelled to Tehran for a path-breaking visit to build a new relationship with the Iranian regime. While the visit shored up Tehran’s invaluable support to India on the international stage (Iran famously stopped a Pakistan-backed Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) proposal against India at the UN HRC in 1994 after an air-dash visit by then Foreign Minister Dinesh Singh to request President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani’s help), it also began a conversation between the two countries over Chabahar.
In the 1990s, Iran offered India a chance to develop Chabahar, and some groundwork was laid. But it wasn’t until Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to Tehran in 2001 and then President Mohammad Khatami’s visit to Delhi as the chief guest on Republic Day in 2003 that discussions sealed the Chabahar deal between the two countries. According to the Delhi Declaration signed by both leaders, the two countries decided to build the sea link from India to Chabahar, and “through Chabahar to the National Iranian Rail Road”, enabling India to connect to Central Asia and Europe.
