[Reader-list] Iran: Inquilab Zindabad?

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

I have been thinking about Iran constantly in the past two weeks or  
so. And I thought I would share with all of you something that I  
wrote today. I hope that it can contribute to the discussion on the  
situation in Iran on this list, and elsewhere. Please feel free to  
forward this to as many people as you know.

regards

Shuddha
===================


Iran: Inquilab Zindabad?

(apologies for cross posting on Kafila.org)

Once upon a time, only a hundred or so years ago, and earlier,  
Iranians were our neighbours. Many were friends, relatives - uncles,  
grandparents, ancestors, some were husbands, wives and lovers. And  
cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Murshidabad and Hyderabad spoke Persian  
better than they spoke English, or even Hindi. The distance from  
Tehran and Isfahan to Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore, or across the water  
from Bandar Abbas to Bombay or Karachi, in miles and in the  
imagination, seemed less than what we can even begin to understand  
today.

The Bengal renaissance had one of its points of origin in a Persian  
broadsheet called Mirat ul Akhbar published by Ram Mohan Roy in  
Calcutta. The first Iranian film and the last 'Irani' restaurant both  
have their origins in Bombay. The Sabke-Hindi, or the 'Indian Style'  
continued to adorn the more ornate fringes of Persian poetry in Iran.  
The miniatures painted in the ateliers of Delhi and Agra owed a great  
deal to the paints, brushes, colours and visions of visiting masters  
from Tabriz. The sitar and the sarod came from Iran, and stayed on.  
We shared jokes and stories, poets, prophets and pranksters, wine and  
spices, surnames (Kirmani, Rizvi, Mashadi, Yazdi) and clan histories,  
heresies and wisdom and a thousand other things that neighbours,  
friends, cousins and lovers share.

Then came another time, closer to our times, and Iranians were once  
again friends, some were comrades, in colleges and universities in  
Aligarh, Delhi, Pune and Bangalore.  They were the best footballers  
in Aligarh, the best dancers in Pune, they told the wildest jokes in  
Delhi, some of them were poets, some were athletes, some were fops,  
others saw themselves as revolutionaries. In the early and mid  
eighties of the last century, thousands of Iranians, fugitives from  
the tightening madness of the Islamic Republic (like their  
predecessors, fugitives from the lunacy of the Shah) came to India  
for respite. If you listen to Iranians who once lived in Delhi and  
Aligarh, and are now scattered across the world in Toronto, Berlin,  
Paris, Stockholm, Melbourne and Isfahan, they tell you a little  
known, or forgotten, story of betrayal. Of how the Iranian  
theocracy's spies, (exactly like the Shah's hated SAVAK) aided and  
abetted by Indian intelligence agents, harassed and intimidated  
hundreds of Iranian students and exiles in india. Some committed  
suicide.Others were blackmailed into returning in the name of their  
families, and many were imprisoned immediately, or sent to die at the  
front of a nasty war. Some perished in Tehran's notorious Evin  
prison. Others, those who could resist going back to Iran, soon had  
to leave India, bitter and saddened to leave the cities that to them  
felt closest to home.

The first, and only 'revolution' I encountered as a child was born  
and betrayed in Iran. I was eleven years old in 1979, when the Shah  
of Iran was deposed, and I can still recall vividly, the elation I  
saw in blurred radio-photo images in newspapers, as I scanned them in  
Delhi. The streets of Tehran, to my eleven year old imagination, were  
the most thrilling place to be. It seemed to me, that young people,  
not more than ten to twelve years older than me, people who could  
have been my elder brothers and sisters, were changing history. The  
long shadow of Khomeini's beard, a senseless war between a despotic  
regime in Iraq and the Iranian theocracy, and the betrayal of the  
1979 revolution by the regime that became the Islamic Republic of  
Iran taught me to understand, at a fairly young age, that the  
withering and atrophying of ideals can be the cruellest gift that  
history holds out to those who hold dreams dear.

Ever since then, I have followed what happens to people in Iran as  
one would the fortunes of close relatives cut off by history. I have  
always dreamed of going to Tehran and Isfahan, tried to learn  
Persian, tried to follow the chaotic, joyous, anarchic and  
melancholic edges of Persian cyberspace, tried, whenever possible to  
know and learn more about Iran, and tried my very best to avoid the  
gushing Iranophilia ('No, not all Iranian films are fantastic, many  
are boring, formulaic and predictable') that I know is as irritating  
to intelligent Iranians as gushing Indophilia is to me.

Today, as ever before, the millions of people on the streets of  
Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashhad and elsewhere who  up have risen up  
against the recent 'stolen election' have shown the world the face of  
an Iran that hardly anyone knew, or at least one that many preferred  
not to know. This is an Iran that I have tried to know, at a  
distance, from Delhi, for a while. I have followed it in the  
testaments of Iranian exiles and Iranian dissidents like Akbar Ganji  
and Shirin Ebadi and thousans of others, imprisoned, tortured,  
killed, blackmailed and blacklisted, in the statements of anonymous  
and underground and lesser known Anarchist, Communist and Socialist  
Iranians, Iranian feminists, Iranian workers, Iranian civil rights  
activists, Iranian bloggers, Iranians both religious and non- 
religious who no longer believe that the Islamic Republic's regime  
means anything to them, Iranian filmmakers, artists, poets, writers,  
philosophers, scientists and doctors, Iranian gay and lesbian  
activists, ordinary, decent, hard working, god fearing, sceptical and  
apolotical Iranians who just want to be left in peace and spared the  
depradations of a regime grown fat on the lard of corruption,  
priviledge and hypocrisy. Today, millions of these people, men,  
women, children, older people, pensioners, war veterans, former  
Islamists, believers and non-believers, are showing us that they, and  
not the Khamenei-Ahmedinijad cartel will write the contemporary  
history of Iran.

Today, many of the protestors in Tehran, are taking to the streets  
with placards that carry poems and aphorisms taken from Iran's rich  
literary heritage. A poem, by the much loved Iranian poet Ahmed  
Shamlou, could be read as a poetic allegory for the regime presided  
over by Khamenei and Ahmedinijad. I am sure it is being read as that  
today on the streets of Tehran.

The Cul-de-Sac

"They smell your breath
lest you have said; I love you
They smell your heart
These are strange times, my dear

They flog love
at the roadblock
Let's hide love in the larder

In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends
they feed fires
with logs of song and poetry
Hazard not a thought
These are strange times, my dear

The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night
has come to kill the light
Let's hide light in the larder

There, butchers
are posted in passageways
with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers:
These are strange times, my dear

They chop smiles off lips
and songs off the mouth
Let's hide joy in the larder

Canaries barbecued
on the flames of lilies and jasmines,
These are strange times, my dear

Satan, drunk on victory
squats at the feast of our undoing,
Let's hide God in the larder."


At the same time as the streets of Tehran construct their defiance  
with silence and the reading of poems during the day and the rooftops  
of Tehran articulate their anger with slogans that invoke both the  
greatness of god and the fervent desire for 'death to the  
dictatorship' , we in India are sitting amidst the rising stench of a  
profound, sullen, stunned  about Iran.

We have turned our back on our neighbours, our friends, our sometime  
cousins. We have betrayed, and are continuing to betray those who  
dream of an ordinary, decent, non-theocratic, open society in Iran,  
where people will not be harassed for showing the hair on their  
heads, or jailed for reading certain books or agitating for a fair  
wage, or sentenced to death for being in love with a person of a  
certain gender. We are failing to realize that the victory of the  
forces opposed to the Ahmedinijad clique represent a profound  
transformation in the Muslim world, where the automatic call to  
'politics by prerformed piety' is no longer working. This could well  
be the begining of the end of Islamic fundamentalism, and a return to  
a broad based, class based, secular-democractic politics in the  
Islamicate world, just as the Khomeinist putsch signalled the  
glamorous inauguration of contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism in the  
world and the derailing of the Iranian revolution against the tyranny  
of the Shah by a fascist clerical clique.

Mir Hussain Moussavi, the challenger to Ahmedinijad, may well have  
been associated with the establishment of the Islamic Republic (as  
prime minister) in the early years of the Iran Iraq war, but his long  
exile and distance from politics following his removal from power,  
may have either led him to realize that the regime as it exists is  
unredeemable, or, he may be carried by forces that emanate from the  
popular hatred of the Islamist regime that may even be beyond his  
control. Not all those who are arrayed in the anti-Ahmedinijad  
faction are angels in waiting. Prominent amongst them is the corrupt  
and opportunist Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, whose opposition to Ahmedinijad  
has less to do with his love of liberty and more to do with his  
insatiable lust for power. He derailed the revolution before and  
handed it on a platter to the Islamists, he may derail the revolution  
again, and hand it on a platter to other vested interests.

Whatever be the case, there can be no mistaking the fact that the  
real movers of history at present are neither Moussavi, nor  
Rafsanjani, nor Ahemdinijad or Khamenei. History is being made, not  
by leaders and candidates, by Ayatollahs and clerics, but by ordinary  
people gathering in their millions.Their resistance may have begun as  
a protest from within the Moussavi camp against electoral fraud, but  
it has rapidly become far more generalized. Today, the protests are  
about things much greater than a stolen election alone, they are  
about the fundamental directions that politics, culture and society  
will take in iran today. Even if the Khamenei-Ahmedinijad clique wins  
the day with repression and violence, it will have lost the night.  
Iran by night will continue to resonate with anger and rage. The  
dreams dreamt in Tehran will infect the nightmares of the Supreme  
Leader.

That the government of India, which has to protect its cynical  
interests in the realpolitik of the region should shake hands with  
the hated Ahmedinijad in Moscow, under the tutelage of (Ras)Putin is  
not surprising (after all they also cosy up to the junta in Rangoon  
for the same reason). That there should be nervousness and anxiety in  
the corridors of Tata Steel, Essar, Reliance Petrochemicals and ONGC  
Videsh (each with substantial investments in Iran garnered by  
schmoozing with the Ahmedinijad-Khamenei cartel) is not in itself  
surprising. That the moribund and pathetic sycophancy of the so- 
called Communist Party of India (Marxist), which functioned, (while  
it functioned), as the front office of the Iranian regime in India  
(how many more dead communists and leftists in Iran would it have  
taken for the CPI(M) to recognize the fascism of Khomeini-Khameini- 
Ahmedinijad? ) should have rendered it speechless in the face of the  
current developments is not surprising. That the tired hacks of the  
Urdu press should provide apologies for clerical-klepto-fascism in  
iran is not surprising.

While none of this is surprising, it is nevertheless, deeply,  
profoundly saddening.

Remember the pious sloganeering of 'Hands off Iran' which exercised  
the Karats and the Bardhans, and even the more effete and niche  
apparatchiki of student Maoism in JNU and elsewhere, only last year?  
Iran was suddenly the most important issue in Indian politics, it  
appeared that how India's foreign policy oriented oneself towards  
Iran's nuclear ambitions could even make or break governments in  
India. Where are those people who shouted 'Hands off Iran'? Where are  
they now, when the people of Iran need some real solidarity, and not  
the masquerade of 'anti-Imperialism' by proxy that our 'radical' mob- 
masters are so good at. Where are they now, when strong and vocal  
expressions of support for freedom and democracy in Iran could make a  
real difference?

I have already heard some snide remarks and whispers (which have  
attempted to  relieve the obscenity of the stunning silence in India  
regarding Iran) about how the protests in Iran are all engineered,  
about how they are all 'elitist elements' and about how Ahmedinijad  
needs all the support he can get from 'people like us'.

If this is indeed the case, how can one explain the following  
statement of 23rd June, put out by militant Industrial workers (by no  
means the 'velvet revolutionaries' of the elite enclaves of North  
Tehran). And there are many more.

"...We workers, under the present conditions, when social protests  
have taken the form of a mass and a huge movement has come on the  
scene to achieve its demands, see it as our right to put forward the  
demands of fellow workers and to raise our banner. These demands are  
as follows:

    1. Immediate increase in the minimum wage to over 1 million  
tomans [$1010] a month.
    2. An end to temporary contracts and new forms of work contracts.
    3. The disbanding of the Labour House and the Islamic Labour  
Councils as government organisations in the factories and workshops,  
and the setting up of shoras [councils] and other workers’  
organisations independent from the government.
    4. Immediate payment of workers’ unpaid wages without any excuses.
    5. An end to laying-off workers and payment of adequate  
unemployment insurance to all unemployed workers.
    6. The immediate release of all political prisoners including the  
workers arrested on May Day, Jafar Azimzadeh, Gholamreza Khani, Said  
Yuzi, Said Rostami, Mehdi Farahi-Shandiz, Kaveh Mozafari, Mansour  
Osanloo and Ebrahim Madadi, and an end to surveillance and harassment  
of workers and labour leaders.
    7. The right to strike, protest, assemble and the freedom of  
speech and the press are the workers’ absolute right.
    8. An end to sexual discrimination, child labour and the sacking  
of foreign workers.

Workers! Today we have a duty to intervene, to pose our demands  
independently and by relying on our own united strength, together  
with other sections of society, to work towards achieving our human  
rights.

The Free Trade Union of Iranian Workers

[ See - http://hopinewsfromiran.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/message-from- 
iranian-workers-free-trade-union/ ]

To this statement could be added calls to strike by workers in the  
Khodro Automobile Plant, of Bus Drivers and Transport Workers, of  
Workers in the Oil Industry and even of the lower echelons of the  
bureaucracy. These voices will only grow.

Each of these calls have led to intimidation by the Basij, the gangs  
of Islamist thugs maintained by the state, even as regular units of  
the police, army and even some sections of the elite Revolutionary  
Guards seem reluctant to use force against striking and demonstrating  
people. The Basij have been particularly brutal with young women, who  
are seen as leading protests and especially vocal in their opposition  
to the repression unleashed by the regime. The death of Neda Agha  
Soltan, a 26 year old student of Islamic Philosophy and a largely  
apolitical music enthusiast, by anonymous sniper fire has catalysed  
even more fervent opposition, and her memory seems to be in the  
process of being transformed into a symbol of the many who  
(especially the young) who have died or been gravely injured in the  
last few days.

And yet, we in India are surrounded by a silence about Iran. This  
silence cannot be explained away as indifference, as a lack of  
curiosity, as yet another sign of Indian narcissism. Because if it is  
any of those it also signals a deeply unhealthy refusal to engage  
with our neighbourhood, and with the wider world. Sometimes, this  
refusal to engage comes weighed down by a pathetic ignorance of the  
history of our neighbourhood. "What is happening in Iran cannot be  
real", goes this line of thinking, because, "actually they are a  
country of acquiescent fundamentalists, the majority of whom will  
finally toe the Khamenei-Ahmedinijad line".

What this pathetic willingness to capitulate to the Mullahcracy in  
Iran does not understand is that what is going on in Iran is nothing  
new. The Islamists lost their moral legitimacy in Iran a long time  
ago, they actually risk losing their power now. The recent history of  
Iran is a continuous narrative of the opposition by different  
sections of the population against this regime. The difference this  
time, is that all the different sections of the population, women,  
workers, intellectuals, students, young people, the urban poor, and  
even some elements in the establishment, seem to have come together  
to signal that they have run out of patience with the fraud  
perpetrated on the people of Iran in the name of the Islamic Republic.

Those who ignore this forget Iranian history. They forget that   
twenty thousand women had protested against the veil in Tehran as  
long ago as the 8th of March, 1979 (in the early days of the Iranian  
revolution).

That uprisings by workers, by Kurds, by Arab minorities were put down  
with lethal force. That the extrajudicial killings (the 'Chain  
Murders') in 1988 are still a fresh memory.

That thousands of people participated in militant demonstrations  
against land evictions in Meshed ordered by the regime in 1992

That this year, marks the 10th anniversary of the brutal suppression  
of the protests in Tehran University campuses that left many students  
dead in dormitories.

That workers have struck again and again, in courageous illegal  
strikes, in key sectors of the economy, risking death and imprisonment.

That civil rights activists and dissidents such as Akbar Ganji and  
Sajjad Hajarian much like our own Binayak Sen have acted for many  
years, despite disabling imprisonment and assasination attempts, as  
beacons of conscience with their principled opposition to an  
increasingly cynical regime.

If we choose to forget, or ignore these realities, the people of Iran  
will never forgive us, and the thousands of years of things we have  
shared will drown in their bitter alienation from our lives. Our  
neighbours will shun us, because we shunned them when they needed us  
most.

Students in Indian universities, workers, teachers, intellectuals,  
activists, artists and anyone who cares for freedom, for decency in  
India, need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Iran  
today. We need petitions to be signed, statements to be released,  
marches and demonstrations to be organized, sit-ins and boycotts of  
official Iranian delegations to be put into place. We need to put  
pressure on Indian corporations to explain their complicity with the  
brutal Khamenei-Ahmedinijad dictatorship, and we need to ask our  
government how it explains its complicity through silence with state  
terror in Iran. We need exactly what needed to be done in Delhi,  
Calcutta, Bangalore, Trivandrum, Bhopal, Lucknow and Bombay when  
South Africa practiced Apartheid, when Israel bombed Lebanon or Gaza,  
when the USA attacked Iraq and even, as my memory serves me, when the  
Shah of Iran came calling in 1978.

We need to say that today, we are all with the people of Iran. That  
our silence by rage, and our roar by night, will join the wave that  
has begun in Tehran. Then, and then alone can we repay the debt we  
owe, over thousands of years, to our friendship with the people of Iran.

We should remember this the next time, and  whenever, anyone says  
'Inquliab Zindabad' within earshot. For decades, those words, have  
brought together all those committed to liberty and justice in India,  
and even those who have pretended, or are pretending to be committed  
to liberty and justice in India. Both those words are taken from  
Farsi, the common and exalted language of Iran.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net