Pezeshkian arrives in Delhi as India tries to keep Iran and the UAE in one BRICS text

Masoud Pezeshkian was due in New Delhi on Friday afternoon, the first visit by an Iranian president to India since Hassan Rouhani came in February 2018. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to meet him on the margins of the BRICS summit. The two men already met on 31 August in Bishkek, their first encounter since the Iran war began and Pezeshkian's first as president.

The Wire and Indian Express both framed the Delhi stop as an attempt by India to keep Iran and the United Arab Emirates inside a single BRICS text. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, will represent the UAE. Tehran wants language that condemns strikes on Iran. Abu Dhabi wants language that condemns Iranian strikes on Gulf states. At the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi in May those two demands killed a joint declaration. India issued a Chair's Statement instead. The same split has appeared at later ministerial meetings.

Pezeshkian arrives while Iranian and American forces are still exchanging blows around Hormuz. Iranian media reported explosions on the southern coast earlier this week. The IRGC has threatened tankers in Kuwaiti and Bahraini waters. The United States has hit Iranian-linked vessels. Oil is near $105. Chabahar Port, the one piece of Iranian infrastructure India has spent political capital to keep alive, sits inside that war geography.

In Bishkek, Pezeshkian asked Modi to use India's contacts to pull parties away from the path of war and bloodshed. Modi repeated India's willingness to work through BRICS and the SCO. They also discussed transport, maritime routes, Hormuz and Chabahar. Those four nouns will return on Friday. None of them is easy to put in a communique that the UAE will also sign.

Eight years is a long gap for two states that still call each other civilisational partners. Sanctions, the Abraham Accords, and now open war explain most of it. India's interest in Iran is the corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia, cheap energy, and the habit of not letting Riyadh or Washington write its entire West Asia script. Iran's interest in India is a large buyer, a vote in BRICS and SCO, and a channel to governments it no longer reaches in Europe.

The scheduling is tight. Putin holds the Friday morning and early afternoon. Pezeshkian's slot is later. Xi lands Saturday. Indian protocol will keep the three bilateral rooms separate. The drafting room for the leaders' declaration is where they meet by proxy. If that room fails again, India will issue another Chair's Statement and call it chairship. If it succeeds, the adjectives on the war will have been sanded down until both Tehran and Abu Dhabi can live with the dull result.

Energy traders will watch the meeting for any line on Chabahar insurance and rupee settlement that survives American secondary sanctions. Those sanctions are already in the week's news. A handshake in Delhi does not move a tanker through Hormuz. It can keep the port project from being quietly frozen while the war runs. That is a smaller prize than a ceasefire and a larger one than a family photograph.

If Pezeshkian leaves without a usable sentence on the war, the visit still has a bilateral residue: visas, students, pharmaceuticals, and the slow paperwork of a port India does not want to abandon. Those files will be handled by secretaries after the motorcades leave. The president's job this weekend is to sit in the room with the UAE's crown prince and not blow up the communique. That is a low bar. May's ministerial meeting did not clear it.

Pezeshkian's presence is still a fact that would have been unthinkable in a Western-hosted summit this month. Delhi can host him because it hosts the others. That is the service India is selling this weekend: a table big enough for enemies, and a text that may or may not survive contact with them.