Political Economy and the Shift in Pipeline Diplomacy for India A Peace Pipeline to a Pipedream

Historically, the India has been remained as one of the largest consumers of energy and the demand for gas also has been increasing. This is the basic reason that Indian Government has been constantly looking for the supply of gas and crude oil since decades. The first ever visualisation was done in the Indian Parliamentary level that India could have brought gas supply to generate the highly demanding electricity, from the Iran via Pakistan through a gas pipeline. This visualisation by the Indian and Iranian thinktanks gave the idea of Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline to be implemented. The Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline project was first initiated by Iran only in mid1990s in order to transport the Iranian gas through Pakistan to India. However, the idea itself was first proposed in the late 1950s in a scientific article published by the Military College of Engineering, Pakistan. The idea came to the fore in 1989, when Pakistan faced a gas shortage. A preliminary agreement, which was signed between Tehran and Islamabad in 1995, which was later joined by India in 1999. The project aims to provide gas transportation from Iran’s South Pars gas field to the Pakistani city namely “Nawabshah” near the border with India and then to India. Whereas the present scenario is that India is no more involved in this Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project, the critical think-tankers in the Indian Parliamentary level have been constantly raising the voices for reconsideration of joining this gas pipeline project and also, it’s a high time that the entire gas pipeline project works haven’t seen the sunlight and even after signing a bilateral treaty with Pakistan on this gas pipeline project in 2009, the present Iranian Government is at the same time thinking very critically to shut down this project forever. This article looks into the geopolitical as well as economic factors responsible behind such dramatic shift.