Iran-India-Outlook
As the United States presses India to exert greater pressure on Iran to limit its nuclear program, the government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is under increasing pressure from its political critics at home to assert its independence from the United States.

"It is good for the government to be seen taking a stand that the US may not like," said Lalit Mansingh, a former Indian ambassador to Washington.

In fact, for energy-hungry India, good relations with Iran are important for at least three reasons. It is the second largest supplier of oil to India, after Saudi Arabia, and a potential source of natural gas in the future; it wields influence in Afghanistan, which India increasingly considers critical to regional stability; and it commands loyalty from India's substantial community of Shiite Muslims, International Herald Tribune said.

Speaking to an international strategic affairs conference here earlier this month, India's national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, called for delicacy in dealing with Iran.

Narayanan said in front of an audience that was peppered with American and European diplomats that Iran is a big country, it is a major country, with tremendous influence, and you need to deal with it diplomatically.

"Otherwise," he warned, "the world will have to pay a heavy price."
Iran earlier this month announced that it had significantly expanded its plans to enrich uranium. Iran's nuclear ambitions will likely emerge as one of the top foreign policy challenges facing the next American president and inevitably loom over India-United States relations.

Dominating the Iran-India agenda is the proposed pipeline that would ferry natural gas from Iran across Pakistan to India.

Several crucial details of the proposed project, valued at more than $7 billion, are yet to be resolved, including the price of gas and whether Iran will guarantee its supply. The project has been consistently opposed by the Bush administration.

A second equally important agenda item is an agreement, signed in 2005, for the supply of 5 million tons of natural gas a year over a 25-year period. That accord has been held up over price disagreements, because world energy prices have gone up sharply since the deal was signed.

Ahmadinejad's visit to New Delhi, where he will meet with the president, prime minister and several cabinet ministers, is a pit stop on his way home from Sri Lanka, where Iran is helping to modernize an oil refinery and a hydropower project, with a $1.6 billion line of credit.

Iranian Foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who attended university in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, is credited with driving this "Look East" strategy.

Bilateral trade between Iran and India, the bulk of which is oil and gas-related products, increased 55 percent in the last fiscal year to $9.3 billion, according to figures from the Indian government. That amount is about a third of India-United States trade.

In February, the Confederation of Indian Industries, the country's largest business group, took a delegation of 10 companies to Iran to discuss possible business partnerships.

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