Memories of passionate chants of Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Farsi for Woman, Life, Freedom) loomed large when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the Nobel Peace Prize for 2023 to the tireless Iranian activist, Narges Mohammadi, for her valiant fight for human rights in Iran, and especially against oppression on women.

It is the second time that an Iranian woman has won the prize, with the first being Shirin Ebadi, for almost the same issues of democracy, human rights, and emancipation. Coincidentally, Narges Mohammadi herself is the Vice President of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC), which is headed by Shirin Ebadi, now in exile in London. Twenty years apart in awards, Iran is in decidedly more difficult, complex, and intransigent times as compared to Shirin’s days of activism within Iran when it had a reformist President in Mohammad Khatami.

Unlike now, when Iran is virtually isolated and unanswerable to anyone, Khatami had urged ‘dialogue amongst civilizations’ and even publicly supported the United States post the 9/11 terror attack. But a combination of issues including term limits, missteps and unnecessary provocation by the West had emboldened the hardliners, and ushered in the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Soon, curbs on all reforms including the taking down of the ‘Green Movement’ took place and Iran was back to square one. Since then, the moderates and reformists are on the backfoot and the current combination of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is arguably the most intolerant, illiberal and revisionist dispensation. The Mahsa Amini related civil unrest and protests of last year that had gripped global attention but dwindled in the face of an extreme backlash by the Iranian authorities is only a manifestation of the latent frustrations that confront Iranian women, facing constant denialism.

While this protest was specifically against the forcible usage of hijab ~ the likes of Narges Mohammadi have refused to bend with the times. Her Nobel citation said she was being recognised “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes.” However, Narges continues to pay the price for her valourous defiance and remains incarcerated in an Iranian prison, almost continuously since 2010.

It is a strange situation for such women, who have had to endure the most vile, false and vicious barbs and innuendoes that range from personal aspersions to accusations of being ‘anti-national’, when all they protested for as proud Iranians was reform and a progressive outlook. These women have alluded to ‘gender apartheid’ as an institutionalised phenomenon in the Iranian narrative. Even today the Iranian constitution notes the worth of a life of a woman to be half that of a man and that testimony of two women equals the weight of testimony of one man! The Hijab is only a fraction and a metaphor of the inequities and diminishment that the Iranian women face whenever the hardliners assert their own interpretation of Islam.

People like Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi are proud Iranians and repose immense faith in their religion, culture, and even sovereign stands, whenever it reflects moorings that befit its rich heritage and civilisational depth. But what they revolt against is the puritanical and regressive interpretation of some within the clergy who seek to deny, suppress, and even decry the aspirations of women. These women have passionately argued that their faith i.e., Islam, is compatible with human rights, democracy, and freedom of rights, if interpreted liberally and honestly.

As a matter of fact, these women have taken more nuanced views by equally dismissing the pro-West Shah regime as a puppet government (especially the overthrow of the popular government of Mohammad Mosaddeq in a CIA-supported coup) or even defending the right to a peaceful nuclear programme as the same had, “become a cause of national pride for an old nation with a glorious past”. Such evolved positions suggest that they are not exactly the ‘trophies’ of the ‘West’ who have been politically propped up by the Western powers to spout their positions, as postulated by hardliners in Tehran.

Narges Mohammadi now faces an even more unsure future as the already fractured relations between Iran and the ‘Free World’ have been wounded further with talk of Iran’s hand in the recent Hamas attack on Israel. The leverage that some powers had with the authorities in Tehran will count for nought as Iran will face further sanctions and punitive measures should the proof of its purported complicity come to light. Ironically the battle of the sort championed by the likes of Shirin Ebadi or now Narges Mohammadi is not externally driven, but one that typifies the internal faultlines. If anything, their declared position of being ‘enemies’ of a state like Israel, and of the ‘West’ or their disavowal of those who practice Islamophobia, makes them aligned to national positions; the discomfort is only with the societal inequities within.

They have defended the rights and freedoms of the unheard and unrepresented diversities like the Kurds, Baluch, Zoroastrians, Baha’is et al within Iran, as secular and inclusive Iranians. But obviously, the advent of such transformational leaders in the body politic of Iran threatens the stranglehold of the clergy and hardline factions, whose writ runs large without any accountability or answerability to anyone.

In some ways it also dims the societal aspiration as embedded by Ayatollah Khomeini in the ‘Iranian Revolution’ of 1979 and therefore of his legatees, today. It is only regime insecurities and the loss of governance control that drives the metaphorical insistence of Hijab.

But it will be difficult to keep suppressing brave voices like Narges Mohammadi, who said eloquently, “I am, in my own homeland, convicted and imprisoned for the crime of being a human rights defender, a feminist and an opponent of the death penalty. [But] not only have my imprisonment and my recent 16-year sentence not made me feel any regret, they have actually strengthened my convictions and commitment to defending human rights more than ever before”.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)