Iran is a land of
paradoxes, contrasts and contradictions. Consider a few.
» Here, bottled
water is costlier than petrol or diesel — despite the newly introduced
rationing of fuel, which has raised prices.
» Iran is
ruled by the vilayat-e-faqih (government under clerical guidance) system,
which dictates rules of personal conduct, as well as public behaviour.
Orthodox Islam prohibits the depiction of holy figures. But pictures
of various prophets and imams embossed on paper and cloth are routinely
sold in the streets.
» The fastest-growing
faiths are those propounded by cult figures like Sri Sri Ravishankar
and Ramdev. Yoga is a craze, as is transcendental meditation.
» Iran has
long persecuted its Zoroastrian minority, large numbers of whom fled
to India, Central Asia and the West. But it is fiercely proud of the
achievements of the Achaemenian dynasty founded by Cyrus the Great,
a Zoroastrian, who established one of the greatest empires in the pre-Christian
era.
» Iran is
a regimented society. The State has banned more than 110 publications
over the past six years. Yet, a relatively free and often irreverent
art and culture scene flourishes here. Apart from world-class cineastes
such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran boasts of great
opera singers, playwrights, poets and writers.
 |
Lock,
stock and barrel: the Basiji, the Iranian female paramilitary
wing, at a parade |
| |
Iran’s growing
feminist movement has suffered the worst onslaught for its campaign
to promote gender equality |
» Iran is
keen to be regarded as a self-confident, proud, and responsible nation.
But it is so paranoid as to charge academics and senior officials (including
Hossein Moussavian, a former nuclear affairs negotiator) with espionage
and detain them.
» Iran has
strict prohibition laws. But liquor flows like water in Iran’s
living rooms. Locally, it can be legally brewed by ethnic minorities
like the Armenians. Large quantities are smuggled in, including spirits
and wines made in specially set up factories which are meant to quench
demand in Iran. In the cities, you can call a cellular phone to have
it home-delivered.
Last fortnight,
I made a brief trip to Iran, my second visit within a year. Over the
past year, Iran’s political, cultural and human rights situation
has visibly deteriorated. There is fear in the streets as thousands
of women are rounded up for wearing skimpy or colourful headscarves.
Universities have
recently witnessed purges of secular and progressive teachers. Tehran
University now has an ayatollah as its chancellor — for the first
time ever. Schoolteachers have been rounded up in the hundreds for demanding
better working conditions. Many teachers’ union officials were
close supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad two years ago. Today,
they oppose him.
Iran’s growing
feminist movement has suffered the worst onslaught of all for daring
to launch a campaign to collect a million signatures on a petition demanding
amendments to the Constitution, and changes in laws and procedures that
will promote a degree of gender equality. For instance, women are barred
from certain positions in government and the professions. Shirin Ebadi,
who won the Nobel Prize for Peace, was once a judge. But under a new
“Islamic” law, which bars women from becoming judges, she
had to suffer the humiliation of working under her junior as a clerk.
Scores of women
activists have been arrested for launching the one-million-signatures
petition. Two of them have been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment
on vague charges like “conspiracy and disrupting national security”.
 |
Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad |
A new climate of
censorship is visible in elite bodies which were relatively immune from
it so far. Take the Iranian Artists’ Forum, the kind of institution
any country would be proud of. Situated in the heart of Tehran, the
Forum is a pulsating place, with auditoria, seminar rooms and exhibition
halls, at which exciting events in Iran’s flourishing art world
happen. It displays stunning modern sculptures and photographs and is
home to one of the world’s best puppet theatres. The Forum exudes
freedom and creativity. Not many developing countries have a comparable
arts complex inspired by liberal multiculturalism and pluralism.
Hundreds of young
people throng the Forum, a redesigned military barracks located right
next to the long-closed down US Embassy. Its ground-floor coffee shop
is fully vegetarian and serves “chapatti bread”, besides
sandwiches, pizzas, soft drinks and teas (including ayurvedic tea).
Why, it even offers “Gita Set” and “Lotus Set”
thalis!
The Forum too, tragically,
is becoming a target of censorship. Last fortnight, it hosted the release
of a special issue of a remarkable magazine, International Gallerie,
published from Mumbai, which is devoted to Iran’s contemporary
culture. But the Forum management turned down requests to hold a vocal
music performance as part of the event, and also disallowed the display
of some posters based on the issue.
“It’s
not that the management favours censorship”, an art critic told
me, while insisting on anonymity. (Nobody wants to be quoted in Iran
for fear of harassment). “But it’s being closely watched
by the Ministry of Culture. The management is walking the knife’s
edge. If it’s to keep the institution running, it must not do
or say anything critical of the regime — or risk closure. It ends
up practicing self-censorship.”
Similarly, young
students’ haunts like “Café 78” in Tehran’s
Aban Street have been shut down. This is where radical students, both
female and male, would hang out and chat animatedly about avant-garde
art, music, theatre, Che Guevara, politics, whatever.
 |
Pr
windfall: five of the 15 British navy personnel detained
by Iran after their release last month |
| |
Many cadres who organised
the mobilisations that led to the Revolution demand a share in
power |
“Iran has
never been like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan”, a sociologist said.
“We have never had that kind of orthodoxy and rigidity in our
Islam, which is more ritual-based than doctrine-driven. But now, the
mullahs are playing havoc and trying to put Iran into a rigid, dogmatic
mould.” None of this is going down well with the youth. Iran has
one of the world’s youngest populations, which is fairly strongly
exposed to other cultures and aspires to freedom. Iranians interact
closely with the West through the two million Iranian expatriates who
live in North America and Western Europe, through the Internet, and
through popular culture, including Hollywood, Bollywood, jeans and fast
food.
The public, however,
is unable to influence political processes much. The reformists in the
government are weaker than they were just a year ago, and unable to
exercise moderating influence despite the growing unpopularity of President
Ahmedinejad whose candidates were badly defeated in last year’s
elections. It’s as if the best-known reformists had been “neutralised”
by being accommodated in various official bodies such as the National
Expediency Council (Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani) or by being asked to act
as Iran’s special envoys abroad (Mohammed Khatami).
“The isolation
of the moderates and reformists represents a tragedy for Iran and marks
a halt to its gradual evolution towards more openness and freedom,”
says a graphic artist and calligrapher. “If the present trend
continues, Iran will be doomed. And yet, there are no shortcuts to democratisation,
least of all externally induced ones. This society has to evolve its
methods and means to free itself of this repressive culture, and move
forward.”
What explains the
present climate? Social scientists I spoke to identify four broad factors.
A first, short-term, cause lies in the Security Council sanctions on
Iran, imposed for its nuclear programme. These have had an adverse economic
impact — on top of high inflation (currently 13.2 percent), unemployment
(officially 10 percent, but believed to be much higher), and moderate
gdp growth (5 to 6 percent). Ahmedinejad has been accused by his colleagues
of profligate spending, in particular, very nearly running through the
$40 billion special fund created from oil revenues.
The government’s
biggest worry is that Iran’s economy is unable to absorb the 75,000
young people who enter the labour market each year. So it’s toying
with desperate solutions, such as rampant privatisation of the State
and quasi-State companies which dominate Iran’s economy.
The Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an executive order to privatise 80
percent of these enterprises over the next 10 years. This is likely
to aggravate the employment situation through a “downsizing”
of the workforce.
Even more significant
than the sanctions’ economic impact is their political effect:
resentment at Iran’s unfair isolation for what’s seen as
a largely legitimate nuclear programme — despite some non-disclosures
and minor infringements of International Atomic Energy Agency procedures.
Resentment and fear
of victimisation have encouraged Tehran to become more, not less, repressive
— as the Mossavian case shows. The detention of this former ambassador
to Germany and chief negotiator on the nuclear issue under President
Rafsanjani in 2005 — when Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment
in a deal with three European Union countries — appears to be
related to an internal power struggle.
It coincides with
the failure of Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki’s expected
but never-to-be dinner with Condoleezza Rice at Sharm-al-Sheikh in Egypt
recently. Iran is probably signalling it is willing to toughen its stand
on the nuclear issue.
The regime’s
hardliners and conservatives are adept at drumming up a nationalist
response whenever the West threatens them. Their twin slogans for the
year are: “Islam and the Nation”. Britain played straight
into Iranian hardliners’ hands when its sailors entered Iran’s
waters in March. Their release for humanitarian reasons was a public
relations coup for Tehran.
Western pressure
is generating the opposite of its intended effect — not least
because of Iran’s bitter memories of the West’s interference,
bullying and betrayal, especially the cia’s toppling of elected
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Washington’s imposition
of the Shah dictatorship, which it supported to the bitter end until
the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
A second factor
behind the present climate of repression is the need for “regime
maintenance”. The strategy is to periodically crack the whip to
assert the Islamic-clerical basis of government. This probably reflects
shifting balance-of-power inside Iran’s ruling apparatus in favour
of the conservatives vis-à-vis the reformists, who have been
politically weakened.
Third, the internal
shift within the regime reflects a generational change. Many of the
cadres who took the initiative in organising the mass mobilisations
that led to the 1979 Revolution were then in their 20s. They have grown
into ambitious middle-aged leaders and now demand a share of power.
The locus of their
struggle has shifted from the street to high offices. Ahmedinejad’s
election in 2005 represented this shift, as well as the growing aspirations
of the rural/semi-urban poor and lower middle classes in whose name
he speaks. It is remarkable that unlike other presidents, he holds his
cabinet meetings in small towns and tries to respond to local problems.
Yet, his popularity
is now on the decline because of the economic situation and because
he is seen as irresponsible. He may not have another chance, especially
if another conservative leader emerges. But while he is in power, curbs
on freedom are likely to prevail. A fourth factor is related to Iran’s
growing self-assertion and its claims to regional leadership in West
Asia, especially because of the US’s huge losses in Iraq and its
failure to stabilise the situation there. Many policy-makers in Tehran
feel that Iran is destined to gain power and influence in Shia-majority
Iraq no matter whether it’s split along ethnic lines or not.
This has encouraged
intransigence and a willingness to take greater domestic risks by increasing
the level of repression. Western attempts to snub or corner Iran, or
to talk down to it on the nuclear issue — as Rice was apparently
planning to do over the dinner that Mottaki boycotted — will tend
to further harden this approach.
Iran, then, may
be in for a longish period of insecurity, curbs on freedom and rollback
of democratic gains. A good deal of what happens will depend on Iran’s
external relations, in particular its confrontation with the West on
the nuclear programme.
