Azerbaijan, Baku, May 6 / Trend, D.Khatinoglu /
Iranian Mehr News Agency commentator Hossein Amiri in an analytical article published on May 6 believes that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit to India, which began on Sunday, will face challenges to convince Indian officials to join U.S. embargo on Iranian oil.
According to Associated Press, Clinton wants to steer oil-thirsty India away from Iran.
Amiri says India imports about 340 kbpd of Iranian oil, while finding other suppliers and replacing Iranian oil is quite difficult.
The U.S. has exempted 12 countries, including Japan and South Korea from its sanctions because these countries have reduced Iranian oil purchases significantly, however, China and India as Iranian major oil customers have not been exempted yet.
On the other hand, "India has publicly rejected Western sanctions but has pushed refiners to cut imports of oil from Iran by 15-20 percent - enough, it hopes, to win a waiver from Washington, Reuters reported.
Iran and India agreed to double trade turnover by $25 billion until 2015. India allowed paying for about 45 percent of its Iranian oil purchases in rupees, to avoid the banking system obstacles before paying Iranian debts through U.S. dollars.
The 56-member trade delegation, led by the president of Iran's chamber of commerce, will also arrive on Sunday for another round of talks on how the two can trade via a rupee mechanism set up to skirt sanctions. A previous trade mission of Indian businesses to Iran in March had proved unproductive.
Amiri says that the other problem is probable pre-conditions that India may put in exchange for joining U.S. tightening sanctions against Iran, including the request for canceling bans on some military equipments supplies (imposed after India's fist nuclear explosion test in 1974), also accessing American advanced military systems and buying uranium without any limit. This sort of pre-conditions seems be difficult to be agreed by the U.S. easily.
"Finally, India is eying the upcoming meeting between Iran and six powers where they may reach positive results which will lead to West's lifting of embargo on Iranian oil," Amiri added.