Strategic setback to India's Central Asian diplomacy: Congress slams govt on Chabahar port

New Delhi: The Congress on Sunday said the Chabahar port now not being "on the horizon" for India is the second "strategic setback" to the country's Central Asian diplomacy after the closure of its air force base in Ayni in Tajikistan.

Hitting out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh alleged that continuity in governance is an essential reality that is never acknowledged by the "self-obsessed" PM.

Beginning in the late 1990s, India began to explore possibilities of making investments in Iran's Chabahar port as part of an India-Afghanistan-Iran cooperation strategy, Ramesh said on X.

"Finally, after attending the 16th Non Aligned Summit in Tehran, Dr Manmohan Singh gave a fresh impetus to these plans and in May 2013, the Union Cabinet approved an investment of USD 115 million to begin with in Chabahar. It bears recalling that this decision was taken even as India was taking major steps to implement the India-US nuclear agreement that had been signed in October 2008," he said.

Subsequently, in October 2014, the Modi government, like it is always prone to do, repackaged Dr Singh's Chabahar initiative and passed it off as part of Prime Minister Modi's vision, he said.

"There was no allocation for Chabahar in the 2026/27 Budget. Does this mean that India has exited or that its investment commitments for the time being have been fulfilled?" the Congress leader said.

"In any case, Chabahar, which is about 170 kms west of Pakistan's Gwadar port built by China, is now not on the horizon. This is a second strategic setback to India's Central Asian diplomacy, coming as it does after India's closure of its air force base in Ayni near Dushanbe in Tajikistan," Ramesh said.

In a departure from the past, India has not allocated any funds for the Chabahar port project in its Union Budget.