India has been "developing" the Chabahar Port for 20+ years and still not complete. It's like another LCA Tejas. Everytime US put sanctions on Iran, India was the first one to pull out. What changes now?
India was after Chabahar mainly to assert it's economic influence in Afghanistan. Build a port close to Afghanistan, build a new rail line from the port to Afghanistan. It was doable originally with a friendly puppet government of Karzai and Ghani set up by US. Now those guys are gone and Taliban are in. India had always been against Taliban, actively working against it, supported it's removal from power by NATO. In fact, when Taliban took Kabul in 2021, the very first thing they uttered regarding India was "Indians have always been traitors". The rail was never built.
So, what purpose exactly is this port serving for India? Especially considering the fact that India does not even recognize the new Afghanistan as a country. What can it do now for India that existing Iranian ports i.e. at Bandar Abbas cannot? Once India began to see it's Afghan prospects dwindle, despite making some investments, they shifted the goalpost to "this Chabahar project will give us a rail connection to Russia and Europe".. which is quite idiotic considering that the much larger Bandar Abbas port is already operational with an existing rail connection.
I said once previously that Indian decisionmaking and strategy is spontaneous, often devoid of long-term implications and regional developments. Hence they lose out on former projects and get sucked in to sunk-cost fallacies such as this port.
