Iran’s contemptuous response to the UNSC sanctions is bound to have profound consequences for international and regional security and impinge upon many of India’s vital national interests. Yet New Delhi has chosen to posture in front of the domestic audiences.

When it was first faced with the Iran question at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the then external affairs minister, Natwar Singh, laid down the essence of India’s two-fold position. First, Iran’s nuclear weapon proliferation is not in India’s national interest. Second, as a responsible nuclear weapon state, India cannot and will not turn a blind eye to Iranian proliferation. These determinations led, in turn, to India voting twice against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency, in September 2005 and February 2006.

As it came under attack from the communist parties and other coalition partners, the government began to wobble. Sections of the Congress party too began to point to the dangers of losing electoral support of Muslims. As a result we have a number of non sequiturs from the Foreign Office.

The government says Iran has the right to pursue a peaceful nuclear programme. But no one, not even the United States, is questioning this basic right of Iran. Much of recent international diplomacy has been about offering Iran a range of incentives on civilian nuclear energy cooperation, including on the controversial uranium enrichment programme.

The world is now asking a more important question: is Iran prepared to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that it is a party to? On this the Foreign Office simply states that Iran “has undertaken certain obligations that its nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes”. It stops short of publicly asking Iran to implement its legal commitments.

The real issue, which has brought the UNSC into the picture is the one which the Foreign Office ducks. What happens if Iran does not abide by its obligations? The UNSC sanctions reflect the new unanimity within the international community that the time has come to apply pressure against Iran. India’s response to this significant change in the Iranian situation over the weekend is a prayer: address the problem through “peaceful means”.

The Foreign Office says it has ‘noted the passage of the UN Security Council resolution” and is “studying its implications”. One does not have to be rocket scientist to figure out that India has no option but to implement the sanctions, since they have been imposed under the mandatory Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Only fringe elements on the left and the right would urge India to defy the UN for the sake of Tehran.

The government’s current political dissimulation stems from its past inability to prevent the domestic debate from being framed in terms of two false propositions. One is that India’s “independent” foreign policy is under attack from Washington. The other is that Indian diplomacy should not run against Muslim sentiments at home.

The first question, although trivial from an analytical perspective, gained salience amidst the US debate on the nuclear deal with India. With sections of the US Congress choosing to make Iran a test case for India’s non-proliferation credentials, the critics in New Delhi have had a free run raising the bogey of an independent foreign policy.

Ideologues in both Washington and New Delhi, however, missed the simple questions about India’s self-interest. Why in the world would India want Iran to acquire nuclear weapons? And by what logic would India sacrifice its own nuclear interests for the sake of Iran?

Further, the Iranian nuclear weapon programme is no longer a bilateral contest between Washington and Tehran. It is between the UNSC and Iran. Welcome to the world of multilateralism, with the full participation of China and Russia in the sanctions against Iran.

Linking Indian diplomacy to Muslim question at home represents the awful but enduring tradition of vote-bank politics, of which the entire Indian political class has been guilty. It also insults the intelligence of the Indian Muslims by suggesting that foreign policy tokenism could be a substitute for addressing the many real domestic political concerns they have. Worse still, the talk about Iran and the Shia vote in Uttar Pradesh in the capital’s political circles ignores the principal consequence of Tehran’s nuclear ambition — the erosion of Gulf Arab security.

The government could not be oblivious of the many direct messages from friendly Gulf Arab states at the highest political level over the last year that they do not want a nuclear-armed Iran. In case anyone in New Delhi missed these signals, the six nation Gulf Cooperation Council led by Saudi Arabia collectively underlined its concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons programme earlier this month.

The GCC’s plans to develop its own joint nuclear power programme might be symbolic at the moment rather than substantive. GCC’s nuclear talk only serves to highlight its real fears about a nuclear armed Iran. As the first ever Shia Arab entity in post Saddam Hussein Iraq stares at them, the Gulf Arabs are apprehensive of the potential trouble that an assertive Tehran could trigger with their own Shia minorities.

Iran’s nuclear defiance is only partly about the global nuclear order. It is more about rewriting the geopolitics of the Gulf that could unleash new tensions between Arabs and Persians and between the Shia and Sunni. The government, one can only hope, is seized of the new challenges to India’s security interests and will not sacrifice them at the altar of the UP elections.