India has signed agreements with Iran to use Chabahar to expand its trade with Central Asia, an Indian goal to compete with China in that region.
Afghanistan has signed agreements with Iran to use Chabahar as an access port for its imports so it would no longer be almost totally dependent on Pakistan.
Neither country is yet able to get much use out of Chabahar.
For years, Indian officials say they have been urging the Iranians to expedite work on the port facilities to handle specialized cargoes, expand warehousing and provide adequate unloading arrangements so it can become a trading hub.
While the port is functional, it has a capacity of only 2.5 million tons per year, against the target of 12 million tons. Iran has declared Chabahar, located in its Sistan va Baluchestan province, a free trade zone.
At their last meeting in July, the Indian side told Iran a thriving port at Chabahar was in the interest of Tehran, the Central Asian republics, Afghanistan and, of course, India. The Iranian side said it was committed to Chabahar’s development.
“But this is exactly what they said four years ago,” an Indian government official told the Reuters news agency. “There has been hardly any movement since then.”
Indian officials suspect Iranian reluctance to move faster may be linked to its anxieties about the troubled Sistan va Baluchestan region, where Shiite Iran is trying to put down a Sunni Baluchi insurgency.
“We think at the back of the mind there are some concerns that the external influences a thriving port will bring may percolate to the region,” the Indian official said.
India, meanwhile, has completed its end of the trilateral arrangement with Iran and Afghanistan. Indian engineers braved militant attacks to build a 200-kilometer road from Nimroz province in Afghanistan to the Chabahar port, offering landlocked Afghanistan an alternative supply route and reducing its dependence on trucking goods through Pakistan.
Indian officials say they’re willing to put in more money into Chabahar to get it going.
“We are ready to go the extra mile to get this going because this is in everyone’s interest, especially Afghanistan whose only access at the moment is Karachi and which is subject to the vicissitudes of Afghan-Pakistan relations,” the Indian government official told Reuters.
On the global scale, India and China’s quest for clout and resources is represented locally in a tale of two ports.
The port of Chabahar in the southwest corner of Iran is barely 72 kilometers (44 miles) from Pakistan’s deep-water Gwadar port, which China has built to secure its energy supplies.
The dueling ports on the doorstep of the Persian Gulf shipping lanes are another strand in the race between the Asian giants to project influence beyond their shores, and seek resources to feed their fast growing economies.
“These civilian ports are about China and India trying to advance their interests and diversify their trade and access points,” says Rory Medcalf, a specialist on international security at Australia’s Lowy Institute.
“But these could well become elements in a wider competitive dynamic between China and India,” he told Reuters.
A key factor driving India to promote the port in Iran, despite pressure from the United States, is the growing anxiety over the all-weather Gwadar port.
Beijing financed more than 80 percent of the initial development cost of $248 million for the port as part of a plan to open up an energy and trade corridor from the Persian Gulf, across Pakistan to western China.
In theory China needn’t ship all its oil supplies from the Persian Gulf through the Indian Ocean and then up to Shanghai. Instead the oil tankers would drop off at Gwadar, and from there the supplies would be trucked through Pakistan and into China through the Karakoram Highway that China is trying to expand.
It also gives China access to the Indian Ocean where India has long been the main player, after the United States.
More worryingly for New Delhi, the strategic location of Gwadar, 180 kilometers from the Straits of Hormuz, offers Pakistan the chance “to take control over the world energy jugular and interdiction of Indian tankers,” retired Indian Navy Admiral Sureesh Mehta said with considerable fear—and exaggeration.
With the Chinese completing the first phase of development in 2007, Gwadar port became operational shortly afterwards. But its progress, although faster than Chabahar, has been affected by worsening security in Baluchestan, a dispute with port operator PSA of Singapore and the slow pace of road links.
A growing Baluchi insurgency has added to the port’s problems with several Chinese engineers attacked and kidnapped. Baluchi nationalists see the port as another exploitation of the province’s rich mineral resources by Pakistan’s powerful Punjabi elite without any local benefit.