Back to the brink in Iran

Jina Mahsa Amini was a 22-year-old Kurdish girl from Saqez in north-western Iran. She was accosted while visiting Tehran by the Gasht-e-Ershad (Guidance Patrol, commonly known as Morality Police) for being a ‘bad-hijabi’—someone who is not adequately modestly dressed, in line with regime expectations. She was arrested and beaten up while in custody. She died on September 16, 2022, at a Tehran hospital as a result of excessive use of force.

The official version of the Iranian establishment has been that she died of a pre-existing condition—a condition that her father and family deny as having existed. From the time the news of her death and the circumstances came out, Iran has been witnessing the most sustained and geographically the most widespread series of public protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, across 280 cities and towns in all 31 provinces.

These protests could be just another one of a series of protests that the Islamic Republic has seen in the recent past—in 2009, 2017 and 2019. It could also snowball into something far more potent as it merges with wider disaffection against the incumbent regime. The Iranian establishment appears to have regained its authority with severe repression, but has come out of the last six months more shaken than before. Even if the Islamic Republic survives, it is unlikely to emerge unscathed.

Amini’s death was not the first case of custodial death, nor the first of excessive force. Since 2020, Iran has been enforcing its laws on the hijab more stringently than ever before since their introduction in 1979. In the course of 2021, quite a few cases of custodial harassment and even death have taken place at the hands of the Guidance Patrol. It is perhaps the growing frequency of such events that have caused the pushback that has been brewing for some time.

As a consequence of a state-driven modernisation agenda undertaken from the 1930s, the urban and upwardly mobile segments of Iran had become considerably secularised in their practice of religion and general approach to life. Even after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a large number of people in urban Iran retained such secularised sensibilities. However, small-town (shahrestan) society never quite embraced this secularisation, retaining their traditional practices right through the pre-revolutionary era.

When the Islamic Republic came into being in 1979, it made the hijab mandatory for all women in public places—Muslim or not, Iranian or not. Iranian women—especially the urban, educated, upper and middle class—tried to resist this all along. However, the tenor of the regime was such that traditional lower-middle class and provincial values began to be pushed as the sole benchmark of Islamic behaviour, since most of the revolutionary groups that captured power had such origins.

However, the implementation of these laws has tended to vary from province to province, time to time. During the presidential terms of reformist Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997), Sayyid Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) and Hassan Rouhani (2013-21), enforcement of Islamic morality by the police was made less ostentatious and rigid. Hence, the enforcement of Islamic morality has long been a stick for the Iranian conservatives of all shades to beat the reformists with.

In the 1990s, conservatives like Ali Larijani successfully campaigned to assign this function to the Basij paramilitary forces—instead of the police, answerable to the elected government. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad institutionalised the practice with the creation of the Guidance Patrol in 2005. Since the elevation of Ebrahim Raisi to the Presidency in 2021, the increasingly invasive and aggressive enforcement of public morality has been creating considerable disquiet.

Character Of The Protests

The protests that broke out with the death of Amini are markedly different from the women’s rights protests and political mobilisation of women in the past. The protesters are no longer demanding specific rights for women; they are asking for “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”—(dignity for the) woman, (a decent) life and freedom (from repression). The protesters, as in the 1980s and 90s, are no longer limited to largely educated urban cosmopolitan middle-class women, nor are they mostly those in their 20s-50s—they cut across age, sex, class and large and small towns, and the provinces alike.

Although the issue concerns women, the men, young and old, have joined the protests. Women are daring to go out with their heads uncovered, and setting alight their scarves in public. People from different walks of life—ranging from schoolchildren in big and small towns to university students, from oil workers at Abadan to steelworkers in Esfahan—have been joining the protests. Film stars and sportspersons have expressed solidarity with the protesters. The national football team kept quiet during the national anthem before their first match during the football World Cup.

The unpredictable nature of mobilisation and the amorphous character of the protesters have made suppression somewhat difficult, despite the heavy-handed repression. From the looks of it, long-standing economic hardship, stemming from the effects of economic sanctions imposed on the regime as a result of its nuclear programme, have helped the snowballing of grievances of a very large section of the people into these protests.

Thus, instead of demanding redressal of any specific grievances, calls like ‘Marg ba Diktatur’ (down with the dictator, the supreme leader Ali Khamenei) and ‘Mullah az Inja Boro’ (Cleric, get lost) are ringing out. Clearly, the people are no longer demanding a change in the system, they are demanding a change of the system.

The protests are by and large unarmed and non-violent, although occasional retaliations against the security forces are increasing in frequency. The funerals of Amini and those other protesters who have succumbed to the vicious crackdown by the regime have spun off further demonstrations, particularly because the security apparatus has been targeting the fortieth-day memoriam cycles that have generated fresh rounds of protests.

The last time such protest-cycles happened was in 1977-78—which did not end well for the regime, culminating in the revolution of 1979.

The Nature of Repression

The scale and intensity of the repression has been unprecedented since the end of the Iraq War. With more than 5,000 (maybe more than 18,000) arrested and at least 500-plus killed, this happens to be the single largest act of repression by the Islamic Republic in peacetime.

Outlook