After successfully resolving issues regarding the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline with Pakistan on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is now keen to get India’s nod to the deal during his for five-and-half hours visit to New Delhi on Tuesday.During his short stay, he will meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pratibha Patil in back-to-back meetings. Singh is also hosting a dinner for the Iranian President.Ahmedinejad’s first presidential visit to India comes as a part of a whirlwind tour to get political clearances from the heads of Pakistan and India on the gas pipeline deal. In Pakistan on Monday, President Pervez Musharraf and Ahmedinejad cleared all hurdles that had delayed the $7.5-billion gas pipeline project. The two countries will soon ink an agreement on the project. India, too, has indicated that the IPI pipeline deal would be “clinched soon”. Petroleum minister Murli Deora had earlier said that India and Pakistan had almost worked out a general agreement on the transit fee and the visit of the Iranian President would be utilised to pave way for trilateral talks on the deal. Deora had been to Pakistan to iron out the issues with the new PPP-led Government.The 2,700-km-long pipeline is scheduled to be completed by 2011 and would initially carry 600 million cubic metres of gas per day. Besides the IPI pipeline, Iran has said that the two heads of states will also talk about issues of “bilateral, regional and international importance”. The Iran embassy in New Delhi did not want to point to any “specific issue”, but the nuclear programmes of both countries — aimed for peaceful purposes — is also likely to figure in the talks between Singh and Ahmedinejad.Iranian president’s visit is also widely being seen as a gesture towards the Left parties in India, which has always accused the Congress-led coalition of ignoring West Asia. The recent rebuff to Washington on the US State department’s comment on the Indo-Iran relations was a signal to the importance accorded to this presidential visit.
