Gaddam Dharmendra appointed India's envoy to Iran

Senior diplomat Gaddam Dharmendra was on Monday appointed India's next ambassador to Iran, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.

Dharmendra, a 1990-batch Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer, is presently the Additional Secretary in the MEA. He is expected to take up the assignment shortly.

The senior diplomat will replace Saurabh Kumar, who was appointed India's ambassador to Myanmar last month.

Dharmendra's appointment as the new envoy to Iran comes as the United States imposed the "toughest-ever" sanctions on Tehran's banking, energy and shipping industries, in a move aimed at altering the "behaviour" of the country's regime.

Earlier, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo had stated that the sanctions against Iran were an "unprecedented campaign of economic pressure" with the objective to "starve" the Iranian regime of revenue it uses to fund violent actions throughout the Middle East and around the world.

He had warned Iran to "either do a 180-degree turn from its outlaw course of action and act like a normal country, or it can see its economy crumble."

The Trump administration will also penalise countries for importing oil and foreign companies that do business with certain Iranian entities. However, it has granted temporary exemptions to eight countries to continue importing Iranian oil -- China, India, Italy, Greece, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey.