Iran & Radicals

PRAFUL BIDWAI IN IRAN
UNDER THE CHADOR OF THE NEW RADICALS

Has consistent bashing from the West given Iran’s conservative mullahs the handle to turn the clock back on the country?

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.

» 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”.

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. “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.