Great Fears Lurk Near the “Great Show”
The Iranian people – there are around 95 million of them inside Iran alone -- are under exceptional economic and emotional stress. Their currency has shrunk sharply in value, and life has become unaffordable for the great majority of Iranians, including the middle classes. Protesters have been filling the streets of almost every town. A large number have been gunned down. Morgues and hospitals have been overcrowded. The internet remains shut, and international journalists cannot enter Iran.
Who are the demonstrators blaming? Iran’s government. Who should they blame? The clerics who have enforced a stifling theocratic rule over their land from 1979? The US, which for years has imposed crippling sanctions on them and which in June of last year massively bombed their land? Israel, whose agents and devices killed, also in June of last year, many of Iran’s scientists and military officers in their homes, in addition to destroying Iran’s allies in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region? Fellow Iranians who secretly aided Israel’s chilling operations last year?
It appears that even the government of Iran is in two minds. Will simultaneously confronting the power of the US and the ire of the Iranian people finally prove to be too much for a regime that has shown toughness for decades?
MOOD IN TEHRAN
On January 11, Trump said that the US military was considering “very strong options” in Iran while also claiming that Iranian officials had reached out to him “to negotiate.” He added that “we may have to act before” any Iranian leaders meet him or his representatives. On January 13 he announced an additional 25 percent tariff on goods from any nation trading with Iran. Presumably the “very strong options” also include fresh military strikes on Iran.
Following Trump’s statement, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told a conference of foreign ambassadors in Tehran that “the Islamic Republic of Iran is not seeking war but is fully prepared for war. “We are also ready for negotiations, but these negotiations should be fair, with equal rights and based on mutual respect,” he said. Earlier, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, had warned Washington against “a miscalculation.”
“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories (Israel) as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” claimed Qalibaf, a former commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
On the other hand, an AFP journalist in Tehran has been quoted as saying that the capital was “in a state of near paralysis.”
As of writing I have not seen public statements on Iran by either Putin or Xi Jinping, but many in the world seem to harbor frightening forebodings.
Narendra Modi has said nothing about Iran, whose oil India has been buying for decades. I should point out that India has had ties with Iran for millennia, not just for centuries. Our words, songs, stories, paintings, foods and favorite fruits are often similar. Though very few, brief, and not recent, my personal visits to Iran have confirmed the similarity. Those visits, and friendships with Iranians outside their land, have enabled me to see the depth of the Iranian heart and the loftiness of the Iranian soul. I therefore pray that Iran and its people will emerge from their grave current crisis without too heavy a cost.
QUESTIONS FOR IRANIANS
I was never impressed by Tehran’s post-1979 notion of a “national” or “state” religion (Iranian Shiite Islam in this case) and its corollary, the downgrading of anyone outside that religion’s fold. But I am not enamored by the possibility of a 64-year-old US-based son of the pre-1979 ruler parachuting down into Iran with US and Israeli aid and claiming that he would lead a miraculous national recovery.
It is plain, nonetheless, that the Tehran regime must finally ask candid questions of itself. Is the regime willing to seek partners from Iranian civil society on honorable terms? Is it prepared to end its intolerance and self-righteousness? Willing to give Iranian women their rights and voice? Ready to seek the frank advice of Iran’s intellectuals?
As I see it, a new Iran will come into existence not through repression from within, nor from bombs, threats, kidnappings, or assassinations sponsored from outside, but with a united effort by Iranians willing to trust one another and wanting to respect one another -- if a miracle of that kind can occur.
Let’s see if we can figure out President Trump. On January 11 he said, according to an AFP story cited by the Hindu of January 12, that the idea of his Secretary of State Marco Rubio (of Cuban ancestry) becoming president of Cuba “sounded good” to him. Also, on his own digital platform, Truth Social, Trump has called himself “Acting president of Venezuela.”
Worth noting, too, is the information, reported by the BBC and others, that federal prosecutors in the US have opened a criminal investigation into the chair of their Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who has been resisting Trump’s demand for a cut in the interest rate. In a highly unusual move, Powell disclosed that the US Department of Justice had served subpoenas on the agency and threatened a criminal indictment over testimony he gave to a Senate committee about renovations to Federal Reserve buildings.
Calling the probe “unprecedented,” Powell said he believed it was opened due to Donald Trump's anger over the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates despite repeated public pressure from the president. Trump has claimed that he did not “know anything” about the investigation. He has not, however, asked for the investigation to be dropped.
“I don't know anything about it, but [Powell] is certainly not very good at the Fed, and he's not very good at building buildings,” said the president.
LEADERSHIP OR A SHOW?
Trump observers have to ask themselves if they are looking at the president of the world’s most powerful, and perhaps the most consequential, country -- or at something else altogether.
Here is someone who seems to think that he can simultaneously bomb Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Colombia, and Mexico into submission, and who is vocal at the same time about his hunger for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump seems to want a title grander than POTUS. He has desired, and is getting constructed, a grand ballroom. Some claim that Trump also wants his face carved on a tall cliff for posterity to revere. Unlike some other persons in power, he loves to meet the press, and answer their questions.
Are headlines and medals a greater reality for him than wars and bombings? Are the latter merely side facets of a great show he’s conducting? Are we, the world’s citizens, no more than extras in the Great Trump Show?
He seems to be presenting his role in the world as a spectacle where the dialogue should not be taken seriously. Perhaps he wishes to be adjudged a tireless actor whose lines may be cruel but who is in fact a kind-hearted man. However, President Trump is not on a set, and the bombs he orders dropped are real.
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I must touch on a few India matters. As Kalpana Sharma points out in her column on this site, a few mainline newspapers have for once mercifully departed from their customary unconcern with what’s being done to the country’s Muslims and Christians. The Supreme Court’s refusal to grant bail to arrested scholars-cum-student leaders, Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Islam, who have been behind bars for more than five years without being tried in court, has been criticized by the Times of India, the Hindu, the Indian Express, the Hindustan Times, the Economic Times, the Telegraph, and the Deccan Herald. Although Khalid, Islam, and thousands of others remain in detention without trial, this public, India-wide criticism is a rare and welcome event.
BOASTFULNESS
Next I take the liberty to quote from an insightful article in Kolkata’s Telegraph by the novelist and academic, Saikat Majumdar, who wrote (January 9):
“The self-conception of the [Indian] nation now accommodates, indeed, foregrounds, both the calm, saintly superiority of the vishwaguru (“world-teacher”) and the bloodthirsty violence of Dhurandhar (a recent movie that has drawn large crowds across India).
“India frames itself as the world’s teacher, the bearer of knowledge the rest of humanity supposedly lacks... Boastfulness comes to replace capability. Instead of proprietary technology, industrial depth, or strategic leverage, slogans perform the work of achievement.
“The uniqueness of this rhetoric is that while the rest of the world speaks of power, India speaks of destiny, mastery, and the world awaiting our instruction. The sad consequence is the displacement of importance on multiple registers — from the urgency of the present to the imagined and the projected glory of the past and the future, from the material and the demonstrable to the spiritual and the emotional, and, most damningly, the delegitimization of all critique as ‘anti-national’.”
The following remarks by India’s national security chief, Ajit Doval, to 3,000 young Indians who were assembled from all parts of the land in New Delhi on January 10, reveal the thinking that the present dispensation wants lodged in the Indian mind:
“You are lucky that you were born in an Independent India. I was born in a colonised India... Our ancestors fought for independence, they went through so many trials and tribulations... We were a progressive society. We did not attack other civilisations or their temples, but since we were not self-aware when it came to security, history taught us a lesson.
“Countless people lost their lives. Our temples were destroyed, villages were looted, and our civilisation was crushed, while we remained helpless, mute spectators. History challenges us. Today’s youth has that fire. Although revenge is not a good word, it is powerful. We must take revenge for our country by rebuilding a great Bharat based on our values.”
Although he did not use the word “Muslim”, Doval was in effect asking the 3,000 young Indians to return to their far-flung homes with a reason for indignation against Muslims in general, including the 200-million-plus Muslims living in India, whose ancestors were part of India for centuries.
The allegation daily thrown by the Hindu nationalists who’ve been running India for the last 12 years is that several centuries ago Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples, looted villages, and crushed India’s civilization. Is this daily (and incomplete) resurrection of an ancient past a sound way of fashioning India’s future?
CLOSING A MED SCHOOL
In 2016, Prime Minister Modi opened a new medical college in Jammu town, part of the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, which until 2019 was a full-fledged state of the Indian Union. While J&K’s Jammu region has a Hindu majority, Muslims form a majority in the Kashmir portion and in J&K as a whole. Last fall, after competitive exams, forty-two of the prized college’s 50 seats were filled by Muslims. Aggrieved by this, J&K’s BJP unit launched a campaign for “correcting” the situation. The campaign has succeeded. The college, which was attached to a quality hospital, has been closed down (a technical reason for shutting it was found earlier this month), and it seems that the fifty discharged students have been assured of being fitted at some point into other medical colleges in the union territory. They will have lost many precious months.
Asserting that much of the money for the closed college had come from Hindu donations to a Jammu-based temple, J&K’s BJP unit has claimed victory from the closure, organized celebrations, and distributed sweets. More on this story, including the shock and problems faced by the removed students, can be found from these links:
