Under the Ballot

On the evening of June 20,26-year-old Neda was shot in the chest not long after stepping out of her car to get some cool fresh air in a north-central Tehran neighbourhood. A video of her last moments as she succumbed to the injury went viral,and obituaries around the world hung on to the scant lines of the life story of this student of philosophy and music. In a culture that’s turned so often on the narrative of martyrdom,the regime was quick to prevent chances of key mourning dates from becoming occasions for public gatherings.

In time the Supreme Leader,Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad managed to get a grip on the Iranian street and retrieve an uneasy calm — in which,curiously,relations between the two men too became quite tense. With a bar on a third consecutive four-year term,Ahmadinejad will not be up for re-election this time — but the buzz has it that he is keen to have a chosen confidant take on the traditionalists,presenting the possibility of a multi-layered struggle with the reform movement sure to rally around one among their own.

The resulting campaign is bound to be riveting,and not just for what implications it may have for Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. At the outset in his new book,Revoutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic,Michael Axworthy says about the 2009 power struggle: “Iranians sometimes gave an exaggerated sense of their country’s importance in the world. But for once it appeared justified.” The same may well be said a few months hence of this year’s election. And this book provides a valuable primer to begin making sense of what may transpire then,and how that outcome may play out.

Observers of Iran tend to come to their analysis with enormous reserves of awe for the country — you could say it is a necessary qualification for the task,a crucial factor in trying to count the complexities that make it what it is. Western leaders understand this too,when they make sure to preface stern admonitions to the Iranian regime for its meddling in the neighbourhood or for its persistence with the uranium enrichment project,as the case may be,with words of admiration for Iran’s civilisational importance.

Axworthy exudes it in plenty: “Iran is less a country than a continent,more a civilization than a nation.” Its sense of self-sufficiency in cultural terms,he notes,is matched by the bazaar,a formidable power centre that has influenced events consistently,including the 1979 revolution: “Iran’s bazaars still sell more home-produced goods than are on the market elsewhere and sustain more artisans producing traditional items,of higher quality than you find elsewhere.” Indeed,he contends that were you to take in the sweep of history through the millennia,“A visiting Martian wanting to see the full range of human activity,good and bad,to understand mankind,could well look at Iran as a kind of exploratory course.” 

For the narrower purpose of preparing to understand what the next election could mean for nuclear diplomacy as well as energy and regional security (crucial for India,as it struggles with the sanction affecting its oil imports and the need to stabilise Afgha­nistan),Axworthy counsels abandoning misconceptions about post-1979 Iran and finding a viable way of partnering with Tehran. For this,he implies,it is necessary to be more informatively placed to recognise the nuances of the power struggle there,which may yet go the way of “hardline conservatives” or “a new republican generation” — it’s hard to say right now. But,he cautions,it is an outcome that must,as it eventually will,be decided by the Iranians themselves. Iranians like Neda and artisans getting their wares to the bazaar.