Howrah News Service -  Latest news and headlines on Howrah,West Bengal and World: Iran president to visit India this month


Iran president to visit India this month
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NewsByte on 20 April, 2008 07:38:00
 
New Delhi: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will make his first visit to
India towards the end of April. National Security Advisor M K Narayanan
announced on Sunday that Ahmadinejad "will be visiting India soon" before the
Iranian leader visited Sri Lanka. According to media reports, he is set to
arrive in Colombo on April 28 - so Ahmadinejad is expected to be in Delhi in the
last weekend of April. Narayanan was speaking at the first International
Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS)-Citi India Global Forum in the national
capital.
The previous visit of an Iranian president to India was of Mohammad Khatami as
the chief guest at the Republic Day parade in 2003. The last Indian head of
government to visit Teheran was the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in
2001. Last year, Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee travelled to
Teheran in February and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mehdi Safari was in
Delhi in September.
India has traditionally taken the stand that Iran had a right to develop
peaceful uses of nuclear energy, while fulfilling its international obligations.
It has, therefore, diverged from the US stance of imposing sanctions on Iran and
preferred an institutionalised dialogue to engage the major West Asian country.
Both countries have a lot of commonality on regional issues, especially
Afghanistan, where India is building a road linking the Afghan highways to the
Iranian border. On the energy front, India has been keen to tap Iranian energy
sources through a trans-national pipeline and LNG contracts, but both of these
major projects are still to take off.