Opinion Assertive Ahmadinejad

Earlier this month,Ahmadinejad summarily dismissed foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki and appointed Ali Akbar Salehi,the chairman of the Atomic Energy Council,to the post. The dismissal of Mottaki,who has been Iran’s chief diplomat for nearly five years,came when he was on an official trip to Senegal. Salehi,a nuclear scientist with a PhD from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology,has been designated as the “acting foreign minister” and can’t stay in office longer than three months without parliament’s approval.

Observers of Iran see the inconclusive change of leadership at Tehran’s foreign office as a reflection of the unending tussle within Iran’s system of parallel governance between the elected presidency and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,who heads the paramount clerical establishment.

In another move last week,

Ahmadinejad scrapped longstanding subsidies on food and fuel. Prices of petroleum products have jumped nearly five times since then. Ahmadinejad wants to phase out all subsidies in the next five years. Annual subsidies now amount to nearly $100 billion.

While the removal of subsidies is unpopular,Ahmadinejad has chosen to bite the bullet amidst the growing impact of international sanctions on the Iranian economy. US officials say Iran’s imports of refined petroleum has gone down from 130,000 barrels a day to 19,000 barrels a day in October.

While sanctions have begun to hurt,there is nothing to suggest Tehran is ready to yield on the nuclear question. Far more important over the medium term might be the fragmenting political consensus within Tehran’s ruling elite.

Idea of Iran

Iran or Islam? That is one of the issues animating Iranians at home and abroad these days. On its own,the proposition that Iran has an identity beyond Islam is not shocking from an academic point of view. After all,modern Iran is the legatee of the great Persian civilisation.

Nor can anyone ignore the extraordinary contributions of Persia to the world long before it embraced Islam. If Iran’s civilisational heritage is 2500 years old,the current Islamic Republic is barely 30 years old. The question,however,generates much political heat when the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran is seen as promoting a civilisational identity in opposition to the theocratic establishment. At the head of the new “Iran school” is Efsandiar Rahim Mashaei,who is the main political adviser to Ahmadinejad. He is also personally close to Ahmadinejad. Mashaei’s daughter is married to Ahmadinejad’s son. Mashaei was initially appointed as vice president by Ahmadinejad. After strong protests,Ahmadinejad made him the “cabinet director”. The change in designation has not seen any reduction of Mashaei’s influence on Ahmadinejad.

Speaking in Tehran a few months ago to hundreds of specially invited Iranian expatriates (like the Indian “Pravasi Divas”) last August,Mashaei gave a speech that extolled the virtues of the Persian civilisation rather than the merits of the Islamic republic. He urged the invitees to go back to their exiled homes and preach the “Iranian message”.

“Iran needs to remove the mullahs from power once for all,” Mashaei has been quoted as saying elsewhere,“and return to a great civilisation without the Arab-style clerics who have tainted and destroyed the country for the past 31 years.”

Mashaei also talked about the importance of separation between “din” (religion) and “dowla” (state) contradicting the principle “Velayat-e-Faqih”,or the rule of the clerics,the very ideological foundation of the current regime that has governed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Creation myths

Ahmadinejad is also trying to revive the memory of Cyrus the Great,who founded the Persian empire in the sixth century BC. The Iranian president directed the negotiations with the British Museum to bring on a temporary basis the “Cyrus Cylinder”,which lays out the great emperor’s rules of just governance.

In a ceremony at the unveiling of the Cylinder in Tehran last

September,Ahmadinejad organised a professional performance of events from Cyrus’s life. Copies of Cyrus’s declaration are

being widely distributed by the government.

As Ahmadinejad mobilises Persian nationalism,Supreme Leader Khamenei is not keeping quiet. In a recent speech at a conference convened to discuss the “Iran-Islam” paradigm,Khamenei declared that “use of the two concepts of ‘Islamic’ and ‘Iranian’ does not imply a rejection of the achievements and rightful experiences of either concept”.