Professor Satya Narayan Misra | Economist and Writer TheNewsSite.In | Teaches International Relations |
The funeral attendance of Ayatollah Khamenei last month, on 3rd July, attracted close to 10 million people and was broadly similar to the kind of attendance at the funeral of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. The Indian government was represented by the Bihar Governor, Lt Gen Husain, drawing criticism that the earlier funeral was attended by P. V. Narasimha Rao, the then Foreign Minister. Interestingly, one of the invitees from India was Mehbooba Mufti, President, PDP, former CM of J&K and a Sunni Muslim, who was clearly surprised by the invite and the meticulous care and courtesy extended to her. In a stirring edit in The Hindu, she recounts her surprise that instead of the bedlam she was apprehending, there was no chaos, no frantic mobilisation. There were female journalists, broadcasters and camera operators everywhere, clad in abayas and headscarves, interviewing international delegates with professional confidence. She believes that even in the state of mourning, the dignity of the Iranian people was breathtaking.
Such a perception is sharply at variance with two recent books published recently; one by Torbati & Sharafedin and the other by Raha Nik-Andish. Torbati, a New York Times journalist, and Sharafedin, a veteran Iran correspondent, in their book Stolen Revolution: Betrayal & Hope in Modern Iran, capture not only the machinery of ruthless repression that perpetuates it, but the fragile hope that still survives as its underbelly. Another slim book, Tehran Diaries: Dispatches from Iran under Siege, by the academic and dissident Raha Nik-Andish, recounts how ordinary citizens cope with the daily internal and external threats to life and livelihood and are in a state of siege.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979
It gave rise to today’s Islamic Republic, which was the culmination of tensions that intensified in the wake of the CIA-backed coup restoring the Shah to power after a brief exile in the 1950s. It was animated by competing promises of justice, freedom and moral order, as well as a fight against foreign domination. The coalition that finally toppled the Shah for good included a diverse group of clerics, leftists, students, nationalists and secular intellectuals, united less by a shared rejection of the Shah regime than by a shared rejection of the present. As power narrowed into the hands of a clerical elite around Ayatollah Khomeini, what followed was not the triumph of one coherent ideology. The revolution that was launched with egalitarian ideals and hopes, Torbati & Sharafedin write, “has resulted in a mafia state”.
The early years of the revolutionary movement witnessed the participation of Islamic scholar Mehdi Karroubi. He helped to distribute Khomeini’s speeches across Iran. Hounded and repeatedly arrested by the Shah’s secret police, he helped construct institutions that would support Khomeini’s government. He defended the revolution even as it narrowed politically and morally, enforcing a conservative dress code and banning Western music. But the regime eventually became something far harsher, resorting to mass executions and torture to assert control. The brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s accelerated that transformation. Bolstered by US arms, the eight-year conflict empowered the paramilitary force known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and normalised a politics of sacrifice and surveillance that reshaped public life.
The Green Revolution
When the Green Revolution erupted in 2009 in response to the disputed re-election of the hard-right populist President Ahmadinejad, Karroubi became one of the regime’s most outspoken internal critics. The book’s second part comes alive in its portrait of younger Iranians who experienced the revolution not as a lived memory but as a political inheritance. The authors detail the re-emergence of civil society at the turn of the 21st century, during the Presidency of Khatami. Newspapers flourished. Student youth groups and literary circles proliferated, creating spaces in which democratic practice became part of daily life rather than abstract political theory. Torbati and Sharafedin vividly evoke the mixture of exhilaration and improvisation that defined the Green Movement: campaign materials passed from phone to phone by Bluetooth in subway stations, a human chain stretching for dozens of miles through Tehran. Millions poured into the streets demanding greater accountability. And once again, the State endured—not because dissent disappeared, but because institutions built to contain dissent proved stronger than the forces challenging them.
The protest movement in September 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was arrested by the morality police for wearing her headscarf incorrectly, was a watershed moment for Iran. Women and men taking to the streets were outraged over the slew of social ills symbolised in Amini’s death—the subjugation of women, the repression of minorities, religious chauvinism, police brutality and government corruption. Despite the brutal repression by the Iranian authorities, the movement created ripples in countries like Canada and Germany. For Amini: “The true energy of democracy is patriarchal culture. It is that culture that must be fought.”
The Message of Stolen Revolution
It sends a message that the revolution never fully ends, as the activists and dissidents gather, organise and imagine otherwise. Like the forces that it opposes, it recedes, hardens and bounces back. In the hide and seek of freedom and organised repression, hope and despair, Torbati & Sharafedin see a wisp of hope and light for a revolution stolen by Islamic fundamentalism. Raha Nik-Andish writes how, for most Iranians living under an unpopular regime that is fighting against a hated superpower, it has been a schizophrenic experience. As he writes, “These days, the condition of being a Persian defies simple categories. It’s a country caught between pride in a rich cultural past and shame over the current political reality. These feelings are shaped by a kind of internal exile—even while you are at home.”
Iran as a Civilisation Giant
Mufti Mehbooba, after her recent visit, believes that ‘Iran is not only a modern state but a civilisation giant, carrying its sorrow with poetic eloquence’. Women are dressed as they please, speaking freely, arguing passionately and occupying public spaces. These are incremental gains after the Life, Death, Freedom movement of 2022. Marjane Satrapi, the acclaimed Iranian-French cartoonist and filmmaker, a prominent advocate of women’s rights who died recently, hopes that: “Freedom will arrive at the end, for Iran.”
Between these conflicting perspectives of hope and despair in Iran, two clear trends are discernible. One is the overwhelming urge of the USA to dominate the region through regime change, as it tried to do with Iraq. The other is the vicarious project of Netanyahu to occupy Gaza fully & thwart Iranian influence in the region by firing on the shoulders of Trump. Between the chicanery of Donald Trump and frozen inhumanity of Netanyahu, Iran under the present religious dispensation seems to have emerged as a hero, defying the might of an omnipotent hegemon. However, it camouflages the systemic repression and stifling of the free voice of a large majority, who cry for their beloved country.
[ Opinions expressed personal, doesn’t reflect policy of TheNewsSite.In]
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