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THE theme of regime change reminds me of the two sisters at Aligarh Muslim University who were erudite teachers and voluble in their left-oriented feminism. Prof Waheed Akhtar, a less stridently liberal member of the Urdu faculty, was asked which of the two he found less reprimanding in discussing disputes over a point of view. “The one who isn’t present,” he replied. That’s the lot of rulers and governments too. People tend to prefer the one that isn’t present. It’s only in stories we meet ones that are so enamoured of their rulers that they pray for their lifelong perpetuity.
Regime change is something people crave if they are not plotting to carry out one as and when they can. Rulers, by definition, represent a minority be they Bolshevik or the Mughals or any bourgeois democracy indulging in self-love. Democracies seldom represent everyone’s interest and cater to class interests mostly. In the world’s largest democracy, the Indian election commission is increasingly perceived as playing a decisive role, like Peter Ustinov’s hand in the movie Blackbeard’s Ghost. The ghost made the losing team win by manipulating the ball with his invisible hands.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution, while primarily an urban-led movement, later gained crucial support from rural areas, which were mobilised by promises of development and religious solidarity to counter potential leftist opposition. Post-revolution, the new establishment solidified this support by addressing rural deprivation, with the Jihad-i-Sazandegi (‘construction jihad’) bringing infrastructure, electricity, roads and schools to villages.
Upheavals start with a trigger and assume popular support with the momentum. The French Revolution was initially led by the bourgeoisie and liberal nobles. The American Revolution was conceived by a colonial elite before leaning heavily on the active participation of working-class individuals and farmers. The Russian Revolution sprouted from the seeds planted by two intellectually gifted drinking partners who plotted the overthrow of capitalism from a bay window desk at Cheetham’s library in Manchester. The Iranian Revolution carried a hair’s breadth of a difference between what had originally set out to be ‘the’ Iranian revolution led and controlled by the left. It became the Islamic revolution with Western support. Therein lies the quicksand that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu waded into last week.
A dead Khamenei appears to have become more powerful in death than in life.
Even as they lit the powder keg of mayhem in the Middle East with the assassination of Iran’s revered 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to affect a regime change, American citizens and politicians were taking positions against the war. A dead Khamenei appears to have become, like Banquo’s ghost, more powerful in death than in life. He made that possible by dying in harness at his office thus defying rumours he had fled to Moscow.
Transit to the town hall where actor-activist Jane Fonda was laying into Donald Trump. Of regime change, she said it should begin at home. “This is a desperate immoral act in the hopes that he can score victory and be declared War President ... the people of the United States are here to tell the Trump administration. You may wage this war in our names but not with our consent. ... Let regime change start at home.” Fonda won applause for speaking candidly. But she might want to think of what a regime change in the US really implies. Trump became president after the American people effected their own version of regime change, to stay with the phrase, in November 2024.
And which American regime did Trump replace? Did he not take the baton from his favourite bugbear Joe Biden, the Democratic president who had set off a brutal war in Ukraine, and helped Bejamin Netanyahu with ordnance to slaughter Palestinian children in Gaza? So what does a change in Iran, which seems unlikely to happen to please Trump, mean for the world and for the Iranian people?
Many now believe that it was a folly that Khamenei was an ardent opponent of nuclear weapons and had issued a fatwa forbidding his country from assembling nuclear weapons. An acid response to the assassination came from British Israeli journalist Jonathan Cooke. “Congratulations to the US for killing Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and a steadfast opponent of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Doubtless Iran’s new leader will learn from Khamenei’s mistake and expedite an Iranian nuclear bomb as quickly as possible.”
Some say Trump seeks a Bangladesh-like change that took place with a students’ uprising against Sheikh Hasina. A repetition is a difficult ask not least since the Mossad and the CIA blew up their Iran cover badly in January when they exposed themselves guiding a failed uprising. The Basij, the well-armed and motivated paramilitary organisation, is entrenched in every lane in every city that matters. What then are Netanyahu-Trump duo hoping to do? Dismember Iran by activating ethnic groups on the fringes of the country. Both China and Russia have a huge stake in not letting that happen.
We are left with the ‘royalists’ among Iranians and Israeli supporters who back the son of the overthrown Shah as a desperate alternative. Assuming and not conceding the scenario somehow works out, what would the new ruler do with the quest of nuclear weapons acquisition, which his father had set into motion in the early 1970s? The Shah was critical of the power wielded by Israel in Washington and there’s a YouTube interview of him expressing his anguish at the Jewish control of American media and banks. Would the son capitulate and expect to be accepted by the Iranian establishment as a junior partner to Israel? And finally, we have the discredited Maoists of the Mujahideen-i-Khalq, initially declared terrorists by the US but then courted as its catspaw to explode bombs in city squares. The Aligarh sisters are not around to see the ebb and flow of the revolution in Iran. Had they been around, they would have gleaned a woman’s perspective in Jane Fonda’s rage.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 3rd, 2026
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