Even if we can settle on the price, is the pipeline secure against the Baloch people’s threat to blow it up? Would India want to invest in downstream industries without reliable security guarantees from Pakistan?

With Iran under an expanding sanctions regime, it will be near impossible or too costly to raise the much needed international finance for the pipeline. In any case, India can always import liquefied natural gas from the Gulf, including Iran, in ships. Meanwhile, every time any American says ‘no’, India will have to say ‘yes’ to a pipeline that might not take off in the near future.

• Energy Security Myth: This myth is built on a simple proposition that Iran is a major source of oil for India. According to some estimates, India now imports about 7 per cent of its annual oil requirements from Iran. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, supplies nearly 30 per cent of India’s supplies and has promised to do more to meet India’s energy security requirements. Iran today is not ‘strategic’ in any sense for India’s hydrocarbon imports. It could be in the future, if and when Tehran modernises its hydrocarbon policies and finds itself at peace with the region and the world. That is some distance away.

• Afghanistan Myth: Realists are right in recognising that Indo-Iranian political interests converged in their opposition to the Taliban and support to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan during the late 1990s. That was then. Now, India’s Afghan eggs are in the Hamid Karzai basket and New Delhi will have no reason in the future to abandon the Pushtuns to the mercy of Pakistan.

... contd.