By staff and agency

Iranian diplomat to meet Indian officials on Monday

July 15, 2018 - 10:11

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi will meet Indian External Affairs Ministry officials on Monday, The Hindu reported on Friday.

The visit is taking place as the U.S. is putting pressure on New Delhi to halt its oil imports from Iran. 

According to the newspaper, a U.S. team headed by a senior Treasury Department official will also hold meetings with Indian officials on Tuesday.

“This week Iran’s deputy envoy had warned that India would face a ‘deprivation of all other privileges Iran has offered to India’ if it chose to replace Iranian oil from other sources, although he clarified later that Iran understands India’s ‘difficulties’ with its energy choices and respected its sovereign right to choose partners,” the newspaper quoted the deputy envoy as saying.

President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, on May 8 and plans to re-impose sanctions on Iran. 

He has asked countries to cut their oil imports from Iran by November.
 
India is one of the major importers of the Iranian oil. As the third largest economy in Asia, India has announced that it would not respect extraterritorial sanctions not backed the United Nations.

Under the nuclear agreement, Iran is obliged to put limits on its nuclear activities in exchange for termination of sanctions.

The entire world, excluding despots in Saudi Arabia and the UAE along with extremists in Israel, has expressed an unequivocal support for the preservation of the nuclear agreement without the United States. 

Concurrent with this policy the Joint Commission of the JCPOA held first meeting at the foreign ministerial level in Vienna on July 6. European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who chaired the meeting, announced that Iran and the remaining parties to the nuclear agreement had agreed to continue negotiations, including on economic measures, over how to save the deal.

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