M.K. Bhadrakumar
There is enormous appreciation among Iranian intellectuals, diplomats and politicians regarding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stellar support for their country’s membership of the BRICS grouping. Modi played a key role to navigate Iran’s membership purposively at the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg last August.
The Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be present at Johannesburg. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the summit in person, rubbishing the malicious rumours and canards to the contrary orchestrated by the western media. The Anglo-Saxon game plan was to somehow get Iran’s membership question deferred to an indefinite future.
The defining moment was a phone call from the Iranian President late Ibrahim Raisi to Modi in the week before the summit meeting. However, the ground for the last-minute flurry of diplomatic activity was prepared in the preceding weeks by the National Security Advisor Ajit Doval when he attended the meeting of BRICS national security advisors in Johannesburg in late July, just weeks prior to the summit to review security and economic cooperation.
Doval held separate “working meetings” with his Russian and Iranian counterparts — Nikolai Patrushev and Ali-Akbar Ahmadian respectively. The NSAs discussed Iran’s BRICS membership issue as a core vector of the Johannesburg summit.
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