When Manmohan Singh became prime minister nearly six years ago, no one suspected that he was stubborn. Those who interacted with him as the soft-spoken finance minister under P.V. Narasimha Rao would hardly describe him as obstinate.

It was during the nuclear deal, which he skillfully engineered into an agreement with the United States of America against all odds and later pushed through within the 46-member Nuclear Suppliers Group, that the talk began in New Delhi and Washington in grudging approval of Singh’s stubborn pursuit of an idea he felt deeply committed to. Between last year’s ice-breaking talks with Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, in Sharm el Sheikh and now, the impression of a prime minister who would obstinately stick to his guns has grown by leaps and bounds, reinforced by last week’s Indo-Pakistan foreign-secretary-level talks that did not have the approval of key members of his own council of ministers.

But nothing that Singh has done in his entire career as a politician beats the dogged determination with which he has pursued another of his pet foreign policy ideas for almost 17 years: the idea of bringing India closer to Saudi Arabia. Very few members of Singh’s cabinet have read a historic joint communiqué that was issued in April 1982 at the end of Indira Gandhi’s visit to Saudi Arabia. In part, their reason for not reading this document is that the only copy of it, which was in the possession of Talmiz Ahmad when he was India’s ambassador in Riyadh between January 2000 and July 2003, has been misplaced following Ahmad’s departure as envoy to Oman. His successors obviously did not think the communiqué was worth preserving or archiving.

But Singh read this landmark document in 1994 when he visited Saudi Arabia as finance minister and was struck by what it outlined. The joint communiqué underlined the unconventional but hugely significant view that there is a vital link between the security of South Asia and that of West Asia, especially the Gulf region.

Since that trip to Riyadh 16 years ago, when he revived a dysfunctional joint commission that was set up with good intentions for bilateral cooperation in economic, trade, scientific, technical and cultural activities shortly before Indira Gandhi’s visit, Singh has been determined to explore the idea of a joint security approach for South Asia and the Gulf.

Singh’s visit to Riyadh, which concluded on Monday, represents his determination — like his pursuit of the nuclear deal and a rapprochement with Pakistan — to erect a new pillar of Indian diplomacy and leave his distinct mark on that initiative by picking up the threads of Indo-Saudi relations from where they were left off by Indira Gandhi 28 years ago.

In a country where its strategic community is obsessed with India’s ties with Pakistan, China or the US, it is not widely known or appreciated that soon after becoming prime minister in May 2004, Singh went about exploring the possibility of creating the basis of a new relationship with the Saudi kingdom. But it took a year and a half to produce any tangible movement. That came in January 2006, when King Abdullah arrived in New Delhi on a four-day state visit when he was also the chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations that year.

Last weekend, Singh significantly built on the royal visit of four years ago. His idea, based on his previous visit to the kingdom as finance minister, is to create a relationship with Saudi Arabia which has two dimensions, one economic and the other regional. He went to Riyadh as prime minister when New Delhi’s principled position that the jihad of the 1990s was unhelpful for the long-term security of the region inhabited by Gulf Arabs and South Asians has been vindicated. Unlike Indians two decades ago, the Saudis, Pakistanis and Americans did not understand — or care to assimilate — the lesson that it was this jihad which prepared the ground for the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US or for Pakistan’s current situation as a failed State.

But Singh was not triumphalist during his interactions with King Abdullah and others last weekend over the belated realization in Riyadh and Washington that the very forces which gave succour for extremism in the 1990s are now under siege. His effort, on the other hand, was to prepare the ground for India and Saudi Arabia to be on the same page on this issue.

It is a fact that when India was under assault by terrorists in the late 1980s and thereafter, it got little sympathy from Saudi Arabia. What India had to say in those years was not heard with any seriousness in Riyadh. But there is a clear sense today that the implications of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai are understood in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf, in states which have vulnerable coastlines and domestic jihadis who want to overthrow their governments. Singh’s visit to Saudi Arabia is opportune because this is the right time to explore the space for a strategic alliance between Riyadh and New Delhi.

Indeed, it is vital for India to do so in the light of US efforts for reconciliation with the Taliban in Afghanistan. These efforts have the blessings of Riyadh. The US president, Barack Obama, cannot win the election in 2012 unless the fighting involving American forces is halted well before his re-election campaign gets under way.

A return of the Taliban into Kabul’s power structure in any form will be a victory for Pakistan, and it has serious implications for India’s security. The government must, under the circumstances, be prepared for greater radicalization of disaffected Kashmiris. A Saudi role in regional security, working together with India, therefore, becomes all the more important. That is what Shashi Tharoor, the minister of state for external affairs, intended to convey when he talked about Riyadh’s close relationship with Pakistan “that makes Saudi Arabia even a more valuable interlocutor for us”, a valuable insight into regional diplomacy which unfortunately went over the heads of many of those in the media who accompanied Singh to Riyadh.

However, if India is to guard its flanks, it must balance its overtures to Saudi Arabia by equally putting some substance into its moribund relations with Iran. There is a long-pending invitation for the prime minister from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Iran. In November last year, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, came to India to renew that invitation. India cannot hope to make the most of what Singh has started in Riyadh unless he completes the circle, so to speak, by going to Tehran as well and working out a viable strategy for dealing with the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan.

Such balanced Indian diplomacy in the volatile Gulf is necessary also because Iran recently displaced Saudi Arabia as the number one source for oil imports by India. The foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, was in Tehran a few weeks ago for foreign office consultations, but an opportunity offered by that visit to make the most of a rapidly changing regional scenario was wasted because of the lack of political will in New Delhi in dealing meaningfully with the Iranians for fear that it may upset Washington.

During his visit last weekend, the prime minister built on what he started with Saudi Arabia in 1994 by reviving the joint commission. Recognizing that there is no significant Saudi investment in India he attempted to draw the Saudis into joint energy projects in India and to invest in infrastructure. The growing involvement by Oman and the United Arab Emirates in economic activity in India ought to give greater confidence to the Saudis in developing a stake in India’s emerging economy. Which can only complement the political stakes in Indo-Saudi relations.