The following is an excerpt from A Maverick in Politics: 1991-2024, by Mani Shankar Aiyar, published by Juggernaut. Paragraph breaks have been introduced for ease of reading.
My Cambridge friend, Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri, arranged for me to pay a call on President Musharraf, who had just returned from Oman, where he had discussed the prospects for a possible underwater gas pipeline between Oman and Gwadar in Pakistan. I, therefore, opened with a question about his Oman visit.
The president airily dismissed my question, saying an underwater pipeline was a pipe dream, not technically feasible. Much more important were the overground gas pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan, he said, adding that so long as Afghanistan remained disturbed, the only immediately feasible option was an overland pipeline from Iran to Pakistan, extendable to India, if India wanted.
A Maverick in Politics: 1991-2024, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Juggernaut, 2024.
What I thought would be a courtesy call of ten to fifteen minutes extended to over an hour as the president asked further questions about our assessment of the actual reserves in the Daulatabad gas field in Turkmenistan, which the Asian Development Bank (and the US oil giant, Bechtel) had identified as the principal source of gas supplies. I replied that our experts too were sceptical of Daulatabad’s potential, but if we were to extend Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India (TAPI) to Uzbekistan, landlocked and Russia-locked with abundant reserves, making TAPI into UTAPI, the issue of supplies could be resolved.
Indeed, I went on, why not also include Kazakhstan, which had struck quantities of hydrocarbons in the Caspian basin to extend UTAPI to KUTAPI, then on to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea in the Russian Federation to convert KUTAPI into RUKUTAPI. I triumphantly ended my oration by saying that we should also rope in Azerbaijan, thus ending with ARUKUTAPI!
Musharraf smiled and said he thought that might be feasible as ‘the vowels and the consonants have fallen into place’! He then asked Kasuri to get this studied. I came away feeling rewarded, as my ministry might yet be a major beneficiary of the growing détente between Pakistan and India, symbolized by the back-channel talks on Kashmir the two leaders had initiated through trusted personal envoys.
With the Iranian oil minister scheduled to be in Islamabad in the next few weeks to discuss the IPI, and the Pakistan minister Jadoon having been sounded on an early visit to New Delhi, possibly just a month later, and President Musharraf having given his ‘full backing’ to the project, working groups had been formed to tackle the technical and security aspects of the proposal. This, I said, showed ‘there has been positive forward movement’ and ‘milestones put in place’.
I thus felt I had good reason to be upbeat at the press conference I addressed in Islamabad at the conclusion of my visit. I said, ‘We have signposted the way forward. We can smile with confidence.’ I affirmed my long-held belief that what was needed was for the two countries ‘to have a stake in each other’s economies’. I said Pakistan and India were of the view that the IPI was ‘technologically and economically’ more viable than other options, so other options (such as TAPI) should be regarded as ‘additional’ to IPI, not alternatives.
On the question of security, I said, ‘We have now moved from the stage of asking questions about security to addressing security concerns in a serious and sincere manner.’ As for US objections, I stuck to my line that ‘we are sensitive to their concerns, and we trust they are aware of our requirements’.
With that perspective in mind, I went on to Tehran. The meeting opened with the Iranian oil minister, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, saying he had heard that I had been ‘plotting’ with Pakistan against Iranian interests. I hastened to assure him that the rumour could not possibly be true but, yes, as Pakistan and India were buyers, it was necessary for us to coordinate our offer on prices. Zanganeh seemed reassured. At any rate, the meeting went forward in a harmonious and constructive manner.
The note of caution I heard from our ambassador, K.C. Singh, was not to rely on word of mouth with Iranian elections in the offing. For my part, I felt satisfied at having carried out my mandate from the cabinet. Meanwhile, and almost at the same time that I was in Pakistan and Iran, the prime minister and the External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh were in Washington, DC, visiting with US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. From what I have been able to gather, the US leaders dangled the prospect of a civil nuclear deal, provided India called off negotiations on the IPI.
In early July, I was in Turkey, nominally to attend a large gathering of petroleum experts, but my main objective was to visit Ceyhan, the terminal point of the Baku–Tblisi–Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, whose point of commencement, Baku, I had already visited. I needed to get a fix on how BTC had ensured the security of its long oil pipeline that lay close to the highly disputed flashpoint of Nagorno-Karabakh and the sensitive border points of Nakhchivian and Gegharkunik, which witnessed repeated armed clashes amounting to war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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The pipeline also lay close to terrorist and armed uprisings in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, troubled southern provinces of the Russian Federation. Its entire route through eastern Turkey to the port of Ceyhan lay in Turkey’s insurgency-ridden Kurdish areas. How had the BTC been immunized against terrorist disruption of oil supplies? That, it seemed to me, was a key question to be answered as we went forward with the IPI.
Fortunately, I had found an Indian, Shashi Mukundan, working for BP, perhaps the most important of the BTC partners, whom I had first consulted in Baku and now found in Ceyhan. His answer was simplicity itself. He said they had worked on the legal safeguards for six times longer than it had taken to lay the pipeline. That was when safeguards had been written into the highly detailed agreements before work on the pipeline began.
I was surprised to receive in Istanbul a call from the prime minister’s principal secretary asking me to report to the PM the minute I got back to Delhi. I was in for the coldest shower I have ever taken. The PM asked me to go slow on the IPI, saying he thought the technological problems were overwhelming and he did not know where we were going to find the required finances.
I protested that the three countries between them had plenty of experience in laying pipelines and, in any case, I had been
approached by Rosneft and another Russian private party, and even Halliburton Dubai, offering to provide technical assistance, even take up the project, if needed.
As for finances, the estimated amount was in the region of $3-4 billion and could be found in the treasuries of the three countries and the internal resources and creditworthiness of the participating commercial entities, state-owned and private. The PM mentioned neither the US nor ILSA, but it would have taken a child to spot that the stumbling block was US objections.
I had to sit it out, but working group meetings went on while I was minister under the joint chairmanship of Petroleum Secretary
S.K. Tripathi and Dr M.H. Nejad Hosseinian, the Iranian deputy minister of the new Iranian government (which had ushered out my
friend Zanganeh). The India–Iran special joint working group, set up in my predecessor’s time, met on 28–29 December 2005. And took a number of far-reaching decisions, including those relating to the ‘project structure’, the ‘framework agreement’ and the ‘gas price structure’.
It was further agreed that there would be a tripartite meeting (which would need cabinet approval) in February 2006 and an itemized roadmap for further meetings in the quarter January–March 2006. But I was out of the ministry at the end of January and never learned whether the talks had gone forward. In any case, the IPI now stands shelved. Twenty years later, we are where we were.
When in February, a Sui gas delegation from Pakistan arrived after I had been dropped from the ministry, I had them over for a very cordial, amiable, informal dinner at my home.
Thus ended the IPI, with a whimper rather than a bang.
Mani Shankar Aiyar is a former Union minister and civil servant.
