The recent remarks by Iranian Ambassador to India, Mohammad Fathali, underscore Tehran’s determination to position Chabahar Port as a strategic, long-horizon undertaking that transcends short-term political headwinds and external pressure.

In his interaction with ANI, the envoy framed Chabahar not simply as an isolated infrastructure asset, but as a key pillar in a broader project of regional connectivity and sustainable development that Iran and India have jointly envisaged over many years.

This framing is particularly significant at a time when US sanctions policy has injected uncertainty into aspects of the port’s operation and future expansion.

Ambassador Fathali located the Chabahar project within the wider context of India–Iran relations, which he described as deep, resilient and historically grounded. According to him, bilateral ties have withstood shifting geopolitical winds and episodic external constraints because they rest on a long record of civilizational contact, economic cooperation and converging strategic interests. He stressed that despite the complications created by US sanctions on Iran’s economy and financial system, New Delhi and Tehran have sustained continuity in engagement and retained a degree of dynamism in key sectors.

From Tehran’s perspective, India and Iran both see themselves as major regional powers with compatible interests in stability, development and multilateral cooperation. The ambassador highlighted this shared outlook as a core political foundation that enables both sides to contemplate long-term projects, such as Chabahar, with confidence that the basic strategic rationale will endure beyond any particular government or temporary policy environment. In his telling, this convergence is not rhetorical, but reflected in a pattern of cooperation across connectivity, energy and regional outreach.

At the same time, Fathali was candid in noting that the full potential of India–Iran collaboration remains far from realised. He singled out energy, transit and connectivity as domains where there is significant headroom for growth. In energy, Iran’s substantial hydrocarbon reserves and prospective petrochemical capacities align with India’s structural demand for reliable, diversified and affordable supplies. In transit and connectivity, Iran’s geography provides land–sea corridors that can materially alter India’s access profile to key regions.

The ambassador was at pains to underscore Iran’s geopolitical position as a regional crossroads. Situated at the intersection of West Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus and with maritime access to the Indian Ocean, Iran offers India an alternative and, in some cases, shorter route to Central Asia, Afghanistan, the broader Eurasian landmass and, via onward connections, Europe. Chabahar Port, in this geography, operates as a gateway node, providing a direct maritime link from India’s western seaboard to the Iranian coast, bypassing Pakistan and enabling Indian cargo to feed into overland corridors heading north and west.

Against this backdrop, the envoy characterised Chabahar as far more than a transactional commercial venture. He described it as a “strategic and long-term initiative” whose primary purposes include enhancing regional connectivity, supporting sustainable development and creating new economic opportunities across multiple countries.

He emphasised that India and Iran have consciously designed their cooperation at Chabahar around shared interests and long-term needs, rather than short-lived commercial calculations. As a result, he argued, the project ought not to be undermined by temporary factors or external coercive measures.

In practical terms, Ambassador Fathali outlined several measures that Iran has undertaken to buttress Chabahar’s resilience and viability. Tehran has moved to diversify the port’s functions beyond basic cargo handling, seeking to turn it into a multi-functional logistics hub with value-added services and integration into broader transit ecosystems. Investments in strengthening logistical infrastructure, including hinterland connectivity, storage, and handling capacity, have been geared towards embedding Chabahar within a wider regional network rather than leaving it dependent on one or two specific flows of trade.

A central element of this approach has been the integration of Chabahar into regional transit networks and emerging connectivity frameworks. The logical complementarity between Chabahar and prospective corridors linking India to Central Asia and Russia via Iran has long been noted by both New Delhi and Tehran.

By improving road and rail links from Chabahar northwards into Iran’s interior and onward to the borders with Afghanistan and Central Asian states, Iran aims to ensure that the port’s utilisation is diversified and anchored in long-term trade patterns. The ambassador’s comments implied that such integration is already being advanced to ensure long-term economic and operational sustainability.

The strategic significance of Chabahar has come into sharper focus because of its location in south-eastern Iran, in relative proximity to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, which has been developed under the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Chabahar offers India an opportunity to project a presence in the northern Arabian Sea littoral in a non-military, developmental and connectivity-oriented manner, while also providing coastal infrastructure that can support humanitarian assistance and regional trade. The port’s configuration, with two primary terminals — Shahid Kalantari and Shahid Beheshti — each equipped with five berths, gives it substantial capacity to handle various categories of cargo, including containers and bulk shipments.

Reflecting the long-term nature of India’s investment and interest, New Delhi signed a 10-year agreement with Tehran in 2024 for the operation of Chabahar Port. The agreement between Indian Ports Global Ltd (IPGL) and Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organisation (PMO) grants India operational control over the Shahid Beheshti terminal.

This terminal is central to the port’s expansion plans and to India’s strategy of embedding itself in regional supply chains linking the Indian Ocean to the Eurasian landmass. The decade-long tenure of the agreement was designed to provide predictability, allow India to amortise investments in equipment and systems, and send a political signal that New Delhi viewed Chabahar as a genuine long-term commitment.

However, developments in 2025 introduced fresh external headwinds to the project. The United States announced that it would withdraw the sanctions waiver that had been granted in 2018 for activities related to Chabahar Port. That original waiver had been justified by Washington on the grounds that Chabahar supported Afghanistan’s economic development and offered an alternative route for humanitarian supplies. Its revocation in 2025 effectively reclassified activities at Chabahar as sanctionable under the Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act, potentially exposing entities and individuals involved in the port’s operation to US secondary sanctions.

The US State Department stated that the revocation would take effect from 29 September 2025, explicitly linking the decision to the “maximum pressure” policy pursued by President Donald Trump against the Iranian regime. Although the Trump administration had previously carved out Chabahar as an exception, the 2025 decision suggested a tightening of the sanctions environment and a willingness to forego the earlier Afghan development rationale in favour of a more uncompromising posture towards Tehran. For India, this created regulatory and reputational risks for companies associated with Chabahar, and complicated financing, insurance and logistics arrangements linked to the project.

It is in this contested environment that Ambassador Fathali’s insistence that Chabahar should not be held hostage to temporary political configurations or unilateral sanctions needs to be understood. He implicitly argued that a project that provides public goods in the form of connectivity and development, and that is anchored in multilateral interests, ought not to be derailed by external punitive measures. His repeated emphasis on “temporary factors” and “external pressures” suggests that Tehran views US sanctions as transitory in strategic terms, even if they have real operational impact in the short and medium term.

From the Iranian vantage point, the diversification of Chabahar’s functions and its deeper integration with regional trade patterns are part of a broader strategy to dilute the leverage of sanctions and make the project too valuable to be easily undermined. By fostering a mix of users, including regional states and private actors, and linking the port into multiple corridors rather than a single India-centric track, Iran seeks to increase the political and economic costs of any effort to isolate the port. This aligns with Iran’s wider strategy of sanctions resistance and economic indigenisation.

For India, Chabahar remains a key instrument in its regional connectivity doctrine, especially in relation to Afghanistan, Central Asia and beyond. It offers a maritime and overland alternative that reduces dependence on routes passing through Pakistan, enhances India’s options for trade and energy access, and strengthens its role as a stakeholder in Eurasian connectivity discussions. Despite the risks of secondary sanctions, New Delhi has consistently signalled that it views Chabahar as a vital strategic asset. The 2024 10-year agreement, signed well after the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, is a testament to India’s willingness to calibrate, rather than abandon, engagement with Iran under sanctions pressure.

The ambassador’s portrayal of India–Iran ties as dynamic but under-realised implicitly points to future opportunities contingent on an easing of the sanctions environment or the emergence of new financial and logistical mechanisms to shield legitimate cooperation from external pressure. Energy cooperation, in particular, remains a latent domain where, once sanctions constraints are eased or circumvented through acceptable mechanisms, flows could rapidly resume and expand. In the meanwhile, connectivity projects such as Chabahar function as concrete, visible manifestations of strategic trust between the two countries.

In analytical terms, the Chabahar case illustrates the tension between long-term geo-economic planning by regional powers and the disruptive potential of extra-regional sanctions regimes. For Iran and India, Chabahar is designed as a structural adjustment to regional geography that serves their mutual interests in diversification, access and autonomy.

For the United States, Iran’s ports and associated infrastructure are potential pressure points within a broader coercive strategy. As a result, the project sits at the intersection of competing logics: connectivity and development on the one hand, and sanctions and pressure on the other.

Ambassador Fathali’s remarks therefore amount to a reaffirmation of Iran’s commitment to the connectivity and development logic, and an appeal — explicit and implicit — that India continue to treat Chabahar as a strategic, long-term effort insulated as far as possible from day-to-day geopolitical turbulence.

His emphasis on sustainability, regional integration and shared interests is intended to reinforce the case that Chabahar’s value will outlast any single sanctions cycle. Whether this vision can be realised in practice will depend not only on Tehran and New Delhi, but also on how the wider international environment evolves, including US policy choices and regional states’ appetite to participate in and utilise the Chabahar corridor despite sanctions-related complications.

Based On ANI Report