Indian speaker to visit to Iran in November

Indian Parliament Speaker Meira Kumar is due to travel to Iran on a five-day visit in the first week of November.Indian Government sources said Kumar will pay the visit at the invitation of Iranian authorities extended to New Delhi over a year ago. Kumar's visit comes towards the end of a year that has seen India increasingly trying to engage Iran. Earlier, Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao had impressed upon Tehran that India wants to have strategic ties with Iran. Menon was reported to have told Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his visit in March that India wants to have "all out strategic relationship" with Tehran. Kumar, who is the first woman speaker of the Lower House of the Parliament (Lok Sabha), will lead a Parliamentary delegation to Iran from November 2 to 6. The Indian speaker is due to have high-level meetings in Tehran.Kumar's decision to visit Iran follows Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's meeting with Ahmadinejad on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September, where the two countries further warmed up to each other. Ahmadinejad renewed Iran's invitation to Singh to visit Tehran during the New York meeting last month. Singh accepted the invitation. Singh's visit to Iran has been in the pipeline for a few years now. There was an invitation earlier too but maybe because of the circumstances there was no political will on either side to make it happen soon. Despite attempts by India to control the damage, its votes in the IAEA in favor of resolutions against Iran for its civilian nuclear activities have adversely impacted relations, with Tehran even suggesting in the past that India could be acting under pressure from the US. India has also sought to repair bilateral ties with Iran because of the evolving situation in Afghanistan, where US-led forces should pull out by 2014. Indian officials believe that Iran, thanks to its traditional antipathy for Taliban, is a natural ally for India in dealing with the Afghan situation after the drawdown. On a three-day visit to Iran in July, Rao had conveyed to Iran that India wanted to elevate ties between the two countries to a strategic level. In her meeting with Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Secretary Saeed Jalili, Rao had said "historical commonalities between the two nations require expansion of strategic cooperation between the two countries".