Why Raisi’s chopper crash should be a wake-up call for India

The world heaved a sigh of relief when Iranian authorities announced that the helicopter crash killing President Ebrahim Raisi as well as foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian came about due to “technical failure” and not, for example, enemy action.Earlier, Israel had expanded the Gaza war by bombing the Iranian embassy in Syria and killing senior Iranian officials inside, to which Iran replied with a missile and drone bombardment of Israel — the first open conflict between the region’s two biggest powers.If Tehran had concluded that Tel Aviv had a hand in killing their president — as many conspiracy mongers were whispering at the time — that would have sparked a larger conflagration that would have potentially engulfed the entire region.What is curious about the crash is that Raisi was flying a very old American helicopter, the Bell 212, essentially a civilian version of the Vietnam war-era Huey chopper. Despite American sanctions and hostility between the US and Iran, the Iranian air force maintained five of these helicopters for its VIP squadron, including the one that crashed with Raisi and Abdollahian.According to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, the average age of Iran’s Bell 212 aircraft is 35 years. Bell developed this helicopter model in the 1960s and stopped producing it in 1998. Overall, thanks to US and European sanctions, Iranian airlines operate some of the oldest aircraft in the world, with an average fleet age of over 25 years.Watch: The final moments before the chopper crash medium nocaption110271864If — as some Iran watchers have suggested — many decades of international sanctions have weighed on the quality of aircraft available to Iran, the really intriguing question is why, given Tehran’s close relationship with Beijing and Moscow, Iran has not gone in for the most advanced Russian or Chinese helicopters currently available to ferry its leaders.Raisi is not welcome in Washington but has been a frequent visitor to Moscow. His government supplied drones to Russia for use in the Ukraine war after Russia was sanctioned by the West.Given the close partnership between Tehran and Moscow — indeed Tehran may have imparted to Moscow valuable lessons on how to dodge Western sanctions — there would have been no problem if Tehran had requested to purchase, say, the latest Russian helicopters.That so far it has not done so indicates Tehran may have lingering doubts about the quality of Russian (or Chinese) equipment. Indeed, with Tehran selling drones to Moscow as well as helping Russia set up its own production lines to mass produce the Shahed-136 attack drone, the direction of tech and equipment flows appears to have gotten reversed.Cause for concernThat Tehran’s doubts may be justified is indicated by the helicopter crash suffered by General Bipin Rawat, the first chief of defence staff of the Indian armed forces. In December 2021, the general was on a routine short flight on the Russian-built Mil Mi-17 military transport helicopter billed as one of the most advanced and dependable in the Indian Air Force (IAF) arsenal, equipped with state-of-the-art avionics and on-board weather radar, which nevertheless came down in bad weather — killing the general, his wife, as well as 12 other military personnel on board.With Gen Rawat in charge of plans for urgently needed modernisation of the Indian armed forces, the crash was a grievous loss. India is the world’s largest arms buyer and most of its military equipment comes from Russia, but this comes at a cost.Despite recent attempts to diversify away from Russian arms, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) figures show that India still bought 36% of its arms imports from Russia during 2019-23, the largest share of any country. This came at a time when Russia’s overall arms exports fell by a whopping 53% compared to the previous five-year period, attesting to its declining capacity to fulfil external demand for quality arms. medium110564018In the face of Western sanctions, Moscow has demonstrated that it can devise stopgap measures to keep up its armaments production for the Ukraine front, with help from friends in Tehran, Beijing and Pyongyang. Nevertheless the long-term effects of being cut off from Western economies, compounded by the exodus of Russia’s educated young, the failure to diversify its economy beyond oil and energy, the costs of the Ukraine war, and the sharp demographic decline that Russia finds itself in, will be dire. Iran has already been under long-term Western sanctions, and they have ravaged its economy. Mass discontent on that score has been compounded by sporadic protests against the lack of civil liberties under Iran’s clerical regime, which exploded in 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was arrested for being improperly veiled.Support for civil liberties may be diminishing in some of democracy’s heartlands, but citizens of authoritarian countries are not exactly happy with their rulers either.Both Raisi and Abdollahian belonged to the hardline nationalist faction that was opposed to the reformists. Raisi directed some of the most pitiless crackdowns on dissent in Iran, including on pro-Amini protesters. Given the threat of war that Iran faces now, there is little likelihood of any let-up in repression.Raisi’s replacement will be elected in a few days, but in Iran elections are more of a ‘selection’ (to use the Pakistani terminology for such contests). It is unlikely that the country’s powerful clerical establishment will allow anyone except the most hardline candidates to contest.Tricky balancing actWhere do all these developments leave New Delhi? Between a rock and a hard place. It faces a blockade on its land borders from Pakistan and China, and hopes to break out through its deal with Iran to construct a port at Chabahar. However, Iran’s confrontation with Israel has put it squarely in America’s sights.Within hours of New Delhi signing a 10-year contract with Tehran to develop and operate a Chabahar port terminal, Washington announced that anyone doing business deals with Iran is at risk of American sanctions. On the other side of the fence, a beleaguered and declining Russia is beholden to China, India’s principal adversary, for a host of reasons.Watch: What US said after India's port deal with Iran medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/xDY98_CyWnw?si=woUyFAAPvwSF-tYGForeign minister S Jaishankar is fond of saying that India is on its own side and not on anybody else’s side. But what does being on its own side mean in this situation?These days — as the world grows more transactional, nasty and brutish — values are falling by the wayside and it is mostly a question of aligning national interests. In those terms, it is worth noting that most of Indian exports are absorbed by the West, some to West Asia, with hardly anything going to the Russia-China condominium.If India has comfortable foreign exchange reserves today, that owes mostly to the West. Thus — when asked about India’s response to the threat of American sanctions — Jaishankar played down the matter, saying New Delhi would “communicate the benefits” of the Chabahar deal to the US and urge countries not to “take a narrow view of it”.This is about right. New Delhi did well not to go ballistic on the issue, as it sometimes does on other matters. Realism is a good principle to follow in the conduct of foreign policy.Read more from the author here.