Iran’s sorrow, lessons for India

Iranrsquos trouncing of Wales in the FIFA World Cup is less momentous than the silence of its soccer players as their countryrsquos national anthem played before their opening match against England A silence daring for its support for Iranian women waging a struggle against the State A silence louder and more credible than Tehranrsquos claims that the West has conspired to foment the protest in Iran against the mandatory wearing of hijabThe Islamic regime seems not to know its own people for whenever Iranian women have been subjected to compulsory veiling or unveiling they have risen to assert their rights enduring batons and bullets suffering imprisonment and death as was the fate of Mahsa Amini Arrested for breaching the dress code in September Amini died days later sparking the ongoing protests in the Islamic RepublicHijab in ironical ways has been the symbol of freedom and dissent in Iran Poet Qurrat alAyn 18171852 was arrested for unveiling herself at a religious conference in 1848 Four years later she was executed but not before she told her executioners ldquoYou can kill me as soon as you like but you cannot stop the emancipation of womenrdquoEightyfour years later in 1936 Iranian ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the Kashfehejab decree proscribing women from veiling in public The majority of women resented the police empowered to snatch away the chador the women would use to cover their body from head to toe writes academician Faegheh Shirazi Fines were slapped on the recalcitrant Families pulled out girls from schoolsReza Shah was compelled to abdicate in 1941 in favour of his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi who decreed that women could decide whether to veil Soon with time middleclass soirees would have both veiled and unveiled women the latter category adopting the latest European fashion trendsIn the late 1970s discontent brewed against the Shahrsquos authoritarianism his failure to bridge the richpoor divide and the Westrsquos influence over him as well as over its control of the countryrsquos oil resources Iranians took to the streets regardless of whether they were Islamists communists or liberals The popular fury compelled the Shah to flee the country in January 1979 Weeks later Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exileIn March Khomeini declared women must wear the hijab at the workplace In response 100000 women took to the streets on March 8 the International Womenrsquos Day against Khomeinirsquos diktat most without sporting the chador or hijab Taken to the protest by her mother Azadeh Tabazadeh in her memoir The Sky Detective How I fled Iran and Became a NASA Scientist remembers seeing two women wearing headscarves and sporting a banner that read ldquoWe are in hijab our daughters are not Let us be who God made us to berdquoKhomeini backtracked only to reissue the contentious hijab order a year later The government deployed GashteErshaad or morality police to enforce the hijab code They subjected women spotted wearing the hijab improperly to physical and verbal abuse The statersquos capacity to control citizens was now complete with the Opposition comprising communists liberalleftists and moderate Islamists either executed or living in exileIt took well over two decades for women to convene in 2006 a conference for initiating what is called the One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality Its goal was to seek annulment of laws discriminatory against women Denied permission to hold the conference the campaigners took to the streets to collect signatures A crackdown was ordered on the leaders the onemillion mark remained elusiveAs time passed a new generation emerged as did technology conducive to undertaking subversive activities Individual defiance increasingly became the norm evident from the Justice for Iran an NGO reporting that more than 30000 women were arrested between 2003 and 2013 for wearing the hijab improperly In 2014 Masih Alinejad an Iranian journalist settled in the US initiated My Stealthy Freedom an online movement which asked women to post their photos without the hijab The growing opposition to the hijab prompted then President Hassan Ruhani to quip ldquoYou canrsquot send people to heaven by the whiprdquoIn 2017 a new campaign White Wednesdays asked people to wear white clothes and scarves every Wednesday The women were supposed to remove the white headscarf place it atop a stick and wave it silently In December 2017 Vida Movahed a 31yearold Tehranian did exactly that Her photo went viral on social media inspiring Iranian women to flood social media with pictures replicating Movahedrsquos defiance In 2018 the Iranian Center for Strategic Studies the Presidentrsquos research arm determined that 49 per cent of the countryrsquos population opposed the compulsory hijab codeThe protest sparked by the death of Amini shows reclaiming freedom snatched away is an incremental painful process It should caution us Indians against Hindutvarsquos endeavour to replace the democratic secular Republic with a Hindu Rashtra and its growing emphasis now on what people should eat read and who they should marry The Iranian teamrsquos protest should have our sporting icons deploy their popularity to condemn the politics of hate which has already victimised cricketers like Wasim Jaffer Mohammed Shami and Arshdeep SinghThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper