Is clean and cheap nuclear fuel for industries reserved for every other
religious people except Muslims?
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
An excellent analysis of Ahmadinejad, Though little lengthy -
Abi.
Ahmadinejad held hostage to bazaar politics
By M K Bhadrakumar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB03Ak02.html
In the geography between the Arabian Sea and the Levant, there is only one
country where it is possible to fancy that an elected government could tumble
because of the price of tomatoes in the bazaar - Iran.
These are turbulent times in Iran. Tehran has passed through such times before.
In the late 1980s, a court in Berlin issued a warrant against then-Iranian
president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for allegedly authorizing the dispatch of
hit squads from Tehran to
murder Iranian dissidents living in the West.
The Western world demonized Rafsanjani then, much in the way President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad is today. But Tehran seems to have weathered the latest Western
attempt to engineer dissension within the Iranian regime.
The importance of Ahmadinejad
The main thing about Ahmadinejad that irritates Washington is his immense
popularity within Iran. It renders absolutely nonsensical any talk of "regime
change" in Iran. Ahmadinejad sets a standard of personal integrity and
simplicity of lifestyle that is rare among the political elite. Mammoth crowds
throng to listen to him at public rallies wherever he goes. He identifies with
their sorrows and dreams. He is easily accessible. He lives in their
neighborhood. This has never happened before - not even during the time of
Mohammed Mossadeq in the early 1950s.
Ahmadinejad is the first "populist" leader Iranians have known. He is restoring
to an extent the "connectivity" of the Iranian regime with the voiceless
millions in Iran. This connectivity was snapped during the past two decades
since ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini passed away in 1989. Since then, Iran's
ruling elite, especially the religious establishment, began incrementally
deviating from the ideals of Ali Shariati that inspired the storm troopers of
the Islamic Revolution who poured into the streets of Tehran chanting his name
in the tumultuous winter of 1978 leading up to the revolution the next year.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "I have no religion, but if I
were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati." One of the two or three
foremost Islamic thinkers of the last century, Shariati's radical blend of
Islam and Marxism electrified a whole generation of Iranian revolutionaries
like Ahmadinejad.
It is a different matter whether radical Islamic egalitarianism, which is
redistributionist and anti-imperialistic, is workable in today's era of
globalization. But that doesn't stop Ahmadinejad from trying. (It doesn't stop
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, either.) The premise of his polemic is simple: the
predatory West motivated by Machiavellian considerations of power and profit
seeks to dominate the Muslim world and seeks to transfer its resources. This
makes conflict inevitable.
To Ahmadinejad, Islam is an ideology and a cultural identity. He is traversing
a moralistic maze that is fundamentally more political than religious. From
the US point of view, that makes Ahmadinejad extremely dangerous. No one like
Ahmadinejad has appeared on the political landscape of the Middle East since
imperial Britain choreographed the region's destiny almost a century ago.
There is also a philosophical angle to it. Shariati's thoughts were profoundly
influenced by his affiliation with Sorbonne University, Marxism, Sartre and
French author and essayist Frantz Fanon. His lectures in Tehran University to
ardent followers like Ahmadinejad, until his tragic death in his early 40s at
the hands of the shah's secret police, focused on popular revolts against
"foreign domination, internal deceit, the power of the feudal lords and
wealthy capitalists" (to quote from Shariati's classic essay "Red Shi'ism vs
Black Shi'ism").
Equally, Shariati was unsparing in his criticism that Islam "left the great
mosque of the common people to become a next-door neighbor to the palace of
Ali Qapu in the Royal Mosque". [1]
All through Shariati's writings one can see that he harnessed religion to
revolutionary politics. He tried to assimilate Shi'ite hopes for a better
world through the return of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, with the revolutionary
agendas of mass struggle and historical progress. In fact, Shariati wrote that
the return of the Mahdi would bring about a "classless society".
In Ahmadinejad's fusion of Shi'ism and revolutionary fervor, too, political
struggle becomes a beautifying myth of heroic valor and triumph of the will.
In his scheme of things, too, the prospects of true justice are inextricably
linked with the return of the Mahdi, which, in turn, can be hastened with
worldly action in the imperfect world of "now". "Our revolution's mission is
to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam," Ahmadinejad has
proclaimed.
But in terms of the geopolitics of the region in which Iran is located, viewed
from the US perspective, "all this owes more to the examples of [Maximilien]
Robespierre and [Josef] Stalin than to those of [Prophet] Mohammed and Ali"
(to borrow the words of Bernard Lewis).
No doubt, what annoys the US is that instead of sticking to mainstream Islam
and reposing trust in faith, hope and pious devotion (as the pro-Western Arab
regimes do), Ahmadinejad has imparted to it a messianic strain, making it a
vehicle for a sort of Heideggerian commitment, resolve and willpower on behalf
of oppressed people.
To be sure, he would have been anathema to British statesman Winston
Churchill - as the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks were. Ahmadinejad's Third World
socialist credo is incendiary. It is agitating an entire region. It has caught
the imagination of (Sunni) Hamas in Palestine and (Shi'ite) Hezbollah in
Lebanon. Ahmadinejad has crossed the sectarian divide in the Muslim Middle East
with an abandon that Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt or Mossadeq couldn't.
Quite naturally, Ahmadinejad doesn't represent all political forces in Iran -
nor did Shariati. This brings us to ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, one of the
founding fathers of the Council of Revolution of Iran, and destined for Iran's
leadership but for his assassination at the age of 52, together with more than
70 members of the Islamic Republic Party, in 1981 in a terrorist attack
sponsored by the United States. (Rafsanjani narrowly escaped when he left the
meeting Beheshti attended a few minutes before the bomb exploded.)
Beheshti was the very antithesis of Shariati. He was a wily political
pragmatist who used religion and ideology as means to power. From obscure
origins as a writer of religious texts in public schools in the shah's Iran,
he catapulted to the forefront of the revolution by his great quality never to
commit himself to any viewpoint. Like Rafsanjani, he was an equivocator par
excellence, capable of endlessly parrying, forever arguing on the need for
calm, invariably positioning at the center of political space. It was
impossible to nail him down. He was a consummate politician.
Khomeini, a great observer of men, was once approached by Rafsanjani in the
heyday of the revolution with the plea that his friend Beheshti was eligible
for Iran's presidency. The imam apparently replied that he would prefer
non-clerics to hold the post of Iran's president! Clearly, two distinct
streams of the Iranian revolution - represented by Shariati and Beheshti -
existed all along. But after Khomeini passed away, the Islamic left lost
ground in the battle for supremacy. Ahmadinejad represents its second coming.
He poses a challenge to powerful sections of the ruling elite. His brand of
revolutionary Shi'ism unnerves the conservative clergy. He spreads unease in
the bazaar with his program of social justice. ("The Hajji Bazaari, even while
exploiting everyone, claims he is everyone's religious brother, and goes to
the mosque to mourn Hossein," Shariati once wrote with sarcasm.) Again,
Ahmadinejad puts off Iran's middle class and intelligentsia by his sheer
earthiness.
Lacking a distinct faction of his own, Ahmadinejad was compelled into
endorsing a ticket of Islamic scholars known as the "Haqqani circle" in the
recent elections to the Assembly of Experts. But in the event, simply in terms
of electoral arithmetic, the alliance between the conservative clergy
(including Rafsanjani), the bazaar and the "reformist" camp, which was
patently an unholy coalition scrambled together for the sake of stalling any
"Ahmedinjad wave", prevailed. The "international community" saw it as
constituting a political setback for Ahmadinejad, though.
Some naively wondered whether Ahmadinejad was on his "way out". But that's not
the way politics works in Tehran. The conservative clergy knows that the system
based on the doctrine of velayat-i-faqih (the sovereign power of the Supreme
Leader as the chief jurist) does not any more appeal to large sections of the
Iranian people, including sizable sections of clerics. The corruption that
began entrapping the religious establishment during Rafsanjani's presidency
(1988-96) became legion. The electoral victory of Ahmadinejad in August 2005
was a wake-up call that the impoverished Iranian people were yearning for
change.
Iran's ruling elite would know that Ahmadinejad 's presidency might well be
the last chance for re-establishing the regime's connectivity with the Iranian
people. The religious leadership, especially a shrewd observer like
Rafsanjani, would realize that any constitutional crisis emanating out of a
power struggle at this critical juncture could as well mean the unraveling of
the Iranian regime.
It is highly significant that Rafsanjani was picked as the Friday Prayer leader
last week in Tehran. It conveyed a message to the outside world that the
religious establishment is savvy enough to counter the conspiracies aimed at
creating dissension within the regime. The veteran leader devoted virtually
his entire sermon to a tirade against foreign powers conspiring against Iran's
national unity. Rafsanjani singled out the US and Israel for vehement
criticism. The day after Rafsanjani spoke, the secretary of the Expediency
Council, Mohsen Rezaei, nailed the canard in the Western media that the
nuclear file had been taken away from Ahmadinejad's government by the Supreme
Leader.
The paradox is that behind the rhetoric, Iran actually possesses a vibrant
political life. The political spectrum is constantly mutating. The latest
indication that the regime could get its act together came last weekend when
Supreme Leader Ali al-Khamenei made the stunning proposal to the visiting
secretary of Russia's National Security Council, Igor Ivanov, that Iran is
willing to form with.
Russia a grouping like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for
gas-producing nations.
Khamenei has dispatched a heavily loaded message for European capitals not to
be misled by the US and Israel into illusions regarding Tehran's capacity to
think and act purposively. It came as a body blow to anyone who fancied that
in comparison with Ahmadinejad, Khamenei "preferred low-level confrontation
with the West", as an American scholar recently wrote.
The domestic political challenges for Ahmadinejad come on the issues of
economic policy, and not on account of what he has said about the Holocaust
(which Khamenei publicly endorsed) or on account of his so-called "hard line"
on the nuclear issue (on which there is vehement public opinion supportive of
Iran's "natural rights"). The prospects of his re-election in 2009 will depend
on how he wards off challenges on the economic front.
The point is, Iran has had a windfall in recent years. Income from oil and gas
exports shot up from US$23 billion in 2002-03 to $55 billion in 2005.
Foreign-exchange reserves reached $47 billion, which is more than twice the
size of Iran's foreign debt.
The New York Times noted recently, "Iran's overall rate of growth is healthy
and rising." Iran predicated its budget last year on the estimation that the
price of oil would be about $44.1 per barrel, while it is estimating that for
the coming year oil prices will average $33.7 per barrel. Evidently, the
Iranian economy has a lot of cushion to absorb any unforeseen resource crunch.
Ahmadinejad told Parliament last week, "The future cannot be predicted. It is
possible our enemies want to reduce oil prices to hurt us. That is why we have
set the price at $33.7 per barrel to show we are ready for anything. Even if
they reduce oil prices, we will be ready to handle it."
Harnessing the windfall from oil income, however, Ahmadinejad has resorted to
a policy of government spending to rachet up domestic production. He has
pumped oil money into government-run projects for creating jobs. This has been
a successful populist measure and it explains the popularity that Ahmadinejad
enjoys in poorer communities. Unemployment fell last year to an eight-year low
of 10.3%. But there has been a downside.
First, his policy of low interest rates drove up lending and led to inflation.
The government spending put more money in the hands of consumers, driving up
demands for goods and services and further fueling inflation. Housing prices
rocketed by more than 100%. There are political implications.
Ahmadinejad 's policy, which puts emphasis on the public sector, virtually
sidelines the Iranian bazaar. Now, the bazaar in Tehran has traditionally
called the shots in the country's political economy. The nexus between the
bazaar and the clergy has begun reacting to Ahmadinejad's redistributive
economic policies. The bazaar has shown it wields clout within Parliament.
Rafsanjani has openly called for privatization and a market-oriented economy.
"We should harmonize our economy with the global economy as soon as possible
... We should activate the private sector in such a way that people can feel
assured that the government will fully support their major investments ... We
should take the private sector seriously," he recently said.
Rafsanjani added that there is an enormous amount of private capital in Iran,
"but we haven't been able to use it properly because we have not adopted the
policies necessary ... We should draft regulations that guarantee security
[for private capital] and eliminate the laws that could create obstacles for
it."
The bazaar has signaled to Ahmadinejad in unmistakable terms.
Iranian media reports show that from January to late August last year prices
of fruit and vegetables in urban areas rose by 20%. During the Ramadan
season, the price of fruit doubled and that of chicken increased by 20%. By
October, in the run-up to the recent elections that Ahmadinejad "lost", his
approval rating dropped to 35%.
A situation is developing on the ground - even if much of it is the
accumulated debris of past economic mismanagement under Ahmadinejad 's
predecessors. The big sharks in the Tehran bazaar seem to be hoarding consumer
goods and creating artificial price increase so that they can sell at inflated
prices. (The large-scale export of Iranian produce to Iraq is also creating
shortages in the market.) "This price rise is the result of an organized
move," Ahmadinejad said last week. He warned that the Interior Ministry will
crack down on economic crimes.
This is a tough call. The logic behind the US thinking on bringing about a
regime change in Tehran is: if economic sanctions could somehow bring the
bazaar under pressure, the bazaar would go lamenting to the clergy, and once
the clergy were upset, that would be the time to sit and watch the fun.
The nexus between Shi'ism and the bazaar is age-old. What prospects does
Ahmadinejad have by tilting at the windmills of this historic nexus? Gripes
over the price of tomatoes could after all form part of a critique.
Note
1. Ali Qapu is a grand palace in Isfahan, Iran. It is on the western side of
Naghsh-i Jahan Square opposite Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. - Wikipedia
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98)
and to Turkey (1998-2001).
With Regards
Abi
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