Inquilab Zindabad?

Once upon a time, only a hundred or so years ago, and earlier, Iranians wereour 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 evenHindi. The distance from Tehran and Isfahan to Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore, oracross the water from Bandar Abbas to Bombay or Karachi, in miles and in theimagination, seemed less than what we can even begin to understand today.

The Bengal renaissance had one of its points of origin in a Persianbroadsheet called Miratul Akhbar published by Ram Mohan Roy in Calcutta. The firstIranian talking film and the last ‘Irani’restaurant both have their origins in Bombay. The Sabk-e-Hindi,or the ‘Indian Style’ continued to adorn the more ornate fringes of Persianpoetry in Iran. The miniatures painted in the ateliers of Delhi and Agra owed agreat deal to the paints, brushes, colours and visions of visiting masters fromTabriz. The sitar and the sarod came from Iran, and stayed on. We shared jokesand stories, poets, prophets and pranksters, wine and spices, surnames (Kirmani,Rizvi, Mashadi, Yazdi) and clan histories, heresies and wisdom and a thousandother things that neighbours, friends, cousins and lovers share.

Then came another time, closer to our times, and Iranians were once againfriends, some were comrades, in colleges and universities in Aligarh, Delhi,Pune and Bangalore. They were the best footballers in Aligarh, the bestdancers 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. Inthe early and mid eighties of the last century, thousands of Iranians, fugitivesfrom the tightening madness of the Islamic Republic (like their predecessors,fugitives from the lunacy of the Shah) came to India for respite. If you listento Iranians who once lived in Delhi and Aligarh, and are now scattered acrossthe world in Toronto, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Melbourne and Isfahan, they tellyou a little known, or forgotten, story of betrayal. Of how the Iraniantheocracy’s spies, (exactly like the Shah’s hated SAVAK) aided and abettedby Indian intelligence agents, harassed and intimidated hundreds of Iranianstudents and exiles in india. Some committed suicide.Others were blackmailedinto returning in the name of their families, and many were imprisonedimmediately, or sent to die at the front of a nasty war. Some perished inTehran’s notorious Evinprison. Others, those who could resist going back to Iran, soon had to leaveIndia, bitter and saddened to leave the cities that to them felt closest tohome.

The first, and only ‘revolution’ I encountered as a child was born andbetrayed in Iran. I was eleven years old in 1979, when the Shah of Iran wasdeposed, and I can still recall vividly, the elation I saw in blurredradio-photo images in newspapers, as I scanned them in Delhi. The streets ofTehran, 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 thanme, people who could have been my elder brothers and sisters, were changinghistory. The long shadow of Khomeini’s beard, a senseless war between adespotic regime in Iraq and the Iranian theocracy, and the betrayal of the 1979revolution by the regime that became the Islamic Republic of Iran taught me tounderstand, at a fairly young age, that the withering and atrophying of idealscan 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 wouldthe fortunes of close relatives cut off by history. I have always dreamed ofgoing to Tehran and Isfahan, tried to learn Persian, tried to follow thechaotic, joyous, anarchic and melancholic edges of Persian cyberspace, tried,whenever possible to know and learn more about Iran, and tried my very best toavoid the gushing Iranophilia (’No, not all Iranian films are fantastic, manyare boring, formulaic and predictable’) that I know is as irritating tointelligent 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 therecent ’stolen election’ have shown the world the face of an Iran thathardly 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 awhile. I have followed it in the testaments of Iranian exiles and Iraniandissidents like AkbarGanji and ShirinEbadi and thousans of others, imprisoned, tortured, killed, blackmailed andblacklisted, in the statements of anonymous and underground and lesser knownAnarchist, Communist and Socialist Iranians, Iranian feminists, Iranian workers,Iranian civil rights activists, Iranian bloggers, Iranians both religious andnon-religious who no longer believe that the Islamic Republic’s regime meansanything 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 beleft in peace and spared the depradations of a regime grown fat on the lard ofcorruption, 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 theKhamenei-Ahmedinijad cartel will write the contemporary history of Iran.

Today, many of the protestors in Tehran, are taking to the streets withplacards that carry poems and aphorisms taken from Iran’s rich literaryheritage. A poem, by the much loved Iranian poet AhmedShamlou, could be read as a poetic allegory for the regime presided over byKhamenei and Ahmedinijad. I am sure it is being read as that today on thestreets of Tehran.

In This Blind Alley by Ahmed Shamlou

(Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak, published in StrangeTimes, My Dear: The P.E.N Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literatureedited by Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi Hakkak, Arcade Publishing, New York,2005)

"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 asthe streets of Tehran construct their defiance with silence and the readingof poems during the day and therooftops of Tehran articulate their anger with slogans that invoke both thegreatness of god and the fervent desire for ‘death to the dictatorship’, we in India are sitting amidst the rising stench of a profound, sullen, stuporabout 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 harassedfor showing the hair on their heads, or jailed for reading certain books oragitating for a fair wage, or sentenced to death for being in love with a personof a certain gender. We are failing to realize that the victory of the forcesopposed to the Ahmadinejad clique represent a profound transformation in theMuslim world, where the automatic call to ‘politics by prerformed piety’ isno longer working. This could well be the begining of the end of Islamicfundamentalism, and a return to a broad based, class based, secular-democracticpolitics in the Islamicate world, just as the Khomeinist putsch signalled theglamorous inauguration of contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism in the world andthe derailing of the Iranian revolution against the tyranny of the Shah by afascist clerical clique.

MirHossein Mousavi, the challenger to Ahmadinejad,may well have been associated with the establishment of the Islamic Republic (asprime minister) in the early years of the Iran Iraq war, but his long exile anddistance from politics following his removal from power, may have either led himto realize that the regime as it exists is unredeemable, or, he may be carriedby forces that emanate from the popular hatred of the Islamist regime that mayeven be beyond his control. Not all those who are arrayed in the anti-Ahmedinijadfaction are angels in waiting. Prominent amongst them is the corrupt andopportunist AliAkbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose opposition to Ahmedinijad has less to dowith his love of liberty and more to do with his insatiable lust for power. Hederailed the revolution before and handed it on a platter to the Islamists, hemay derail the revolution again, and hand it on a platter to other vestedinterests.

Whatever be the case, there can be no mistaking the fact that the real moversof history at present are neither Mousavi, nor Rafsanjani, nor Ahemdinijad orthe ‘SupremeLeader’ Ayatollah 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 havebegun as a protest from within the Moussavi camp against electoral fraud, but ithas rapidly become far more generalized. Today, the protests are about thingsmuch greater than a stolen election alone, they are about the fundamentaldirections that politics, culture and society will take in iran today. Even ifthe Khamenei-Ahmedinijad clique wins the day with repression and violence, itwill have lost the night. Iran by night will continue to resonate with anger andrage.The dreams dreamt in Tehran will infect the nightmares of the SupremeLeader.

That the governmentof India, which has to protect its cynical interests in the realpolitik ofthe region shouldshake hands with the hated Ahmadinejad in Moscow, under the tutelage of (Ras)Putinis not surprising (after all they also cosy up to the junta in Rangoon for thesame reason).

Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh Shaking Hands With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

That there should be nervousness and anxiety in the corridors of TataSteel, Essar,Reliance Petrochemicals and ONGCVidesh (each with substantial investments in Iran garnered by schmoozingwith the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei cartel) is not in itself surprising. That themoribund 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 deadcommunists and leftists in Iran would it have taken for the CPI(M) to recognizethe fascismof Khomeini-Khameini-Ahmadinejad? ) should have rendered it speechless inthe face of the current developments is not surprising. That the tired hacks ofthe Urdu press should provide apologies for clerical-klepto-fascism in iran isnot surprising.

While none of this is surprising, it is nevertheless, deeply, profoundlysaddening.

Remember the pious sloganeering of‘Hands off Iran’ which exercised the Karats and the Bardhans, and eventhe moreeffete and niche apparatchiki of student Maoism in JNU and elsewhere, onlylast year? Iran was suddenly the most important issue in Indian politics, itappeared that how India’s foreign policy oriented oneself towards Iran’snuclear ambitions could even make or break governments in India. Where are thosepeople who shouted ‘Hands off Iran’? Where are they now, when the people ofIran 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 Irancould make a real difference?

I have already heard some snide remarks and whispers (which have attempted torelieve the obscenity of the stunning silence in India regarding Iran) about howthe protests in Iran are all engineered, about how they are all ‘elitistelements’ and about how Ahmadinejad needs all the support he can get from‘people like us’.

If this is indeed the case, how can one explain the followingstatement of 23rd June, put out by militant Industrial workers (by no meansthe ‘velvet revolutionaries’ of the elite enclaves of North Tehran). Andthere 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. "

To this statement could be added calls to strike by workers in the KhodroAutomobile Plant, of BusDrivers and Transport Workers and even of the lower echelons of thebureaucracy.These voices will only grow, andif workers in the Oil Industry go on strike, as they did in 1978 and again in1997, then the Regime’s days are clearly numbered .

Each of these calls have led to intimidation by the Basij,the gangs of Islamist thugs maintained by the state, even as regular units ofthe police, army and even some sections of the elite Revolutionary Guards seemreluctant to use force against striking and demonstrating people.