:: Farrukh Dhondy

There are more votes than voters in Iran

Farrukh Dhondy

"The dream of clear open skies

The rains that never came,

The depths of oceans in her eyes

And only myself to blame..."

From Bachchoo’s Laments

June.27 : "There is more Scotch drunk in Delhi", the old saying goes, "than ever was distilled in Scotland". And now it would seem one may adapt the adage for the Iranian elections: There were more votes cast for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than there are hands to cast them.

The Guardian Council, the hand-picked advisers and kitchen Cabinet of the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, extended a deceptive concession to the followers of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the presidential candidate, who was, his followers claim, cheated in the election. They agreed to recount 10 per cent of the votes. The Mousavi revolutionaries reject the offer out of hand. They demand that the election be held again and it appears that hundreds of thousands of them are willing to resort to militant action on the streets of the cities to enforce their will.

The recount offered by the Council on behalf of Khamenei, they say, is a delaying tactic and an attempt to defuse the explosive, increasingly-militant gathering of support for Mr Mousavi. Khamenei has very explicitly endorsed Mr Ahmadinejad, declaring the election legitimate and calling on the demonstrators to accept the election result and abandon all protest. Having taken such a position he is hardly likely to retract. The Council’s recount, if it goes ahead, is as likely to declare Mr Ahmadinejad’s victory by 62 per cent to be fraudulent as it is likely for the American Senate to put George W. Bush on trial for war crimes in Iraq. Systems, apart from computer ones, don’t pack themselves up.

There have been "neutral" voices from Iran who say that it is likely that Mr Ahmadinejad did win the popular vote. Their argument is that the incumbent President built massive support in the rural districts by distributing free sacks of potatoes and pursuing some policies which redistributed Iran’s oil wealth to the largely rural population. Iran’s nuclear stance, Mr Ahmadinejad’s espousal of orthodox Shia values and regulations and his general macho stance towards the world would have appealed to the peasant class and poorer city dwellers. The rampant inflation and the economic bankruptcy of his policies, which have isolated Iran from the global forces and material advances of the last decade and made it a client trading state of China and Russia, would cause distress to and dismay the Iranian urban and middle classes. Not the larger voting peasantry. These are academic and intellectual issues espoused by the blogeratti, not the struggling masses.

Nevertheless, researchers from the University of St. Andrews and from the think-tank Chatham House in London followed the Iranian election closely and have now published their analysis. The claims of rigging seem, according to them, to be true.

The provinces of Mazandaran and Yazd are by and large rural and conservative and would in all likelihood have endorsed Mr Ahmadinejad, but the research finds that the number of votes cast in these provinces far exceed the number of existing voters. Four other conservative provinces declared turnouts for the election close to 100 per cent. Really?

In order to win the 10 other provinces in which there were overwhelming, if not unanimous, votes for Mr Ahmadinejad, the survey claims that he would have had to have won the votes of all the voters who had come of age since the 2005 election, plus all the votes that went in 2005 to his rival Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, plus half the votes of the other 2005 contenders. Not likely, especially because several of those provinces have significant minorities of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sunnis and others who do not vote conservative and would certainly have voted as a block for Mr Mousavi or another candidate.

The number of votes claimed for Mr Ahmadinejad in the districts of Ilan, Lorestan and Hormozgan also seem extremely dodgy.

Lorestan is the constituency and home of Mehdi Karoubi, the most liberal candidate in the election. In 2005, he was officially declared to have won 440,247 votes, or 55 per cent of those cast. In this election, the official poll for Mr Karoubi was 4.6 per cent — surely a concocted figure. He hasn’t renounced Islam, fiddled his expenses or been caught with 18-year-old models since.

The survey challenges the opinion that gives the countryside to Mr Ahmadinejad. Though there are no firm statistics, there is, says the analysis, enough evidence that the rural population voted on issues wider than free potatoes and a precarious and short-lived bail-out from the generally prevailing poverty. They too care about Iran’s isolating policies.

The suppression of the mass demonstration grows more virulent as the demonstrators display their determination, courage and stamina. Khamenei, in his speech to the nation at Friday prayers in the University of Tehran mosque, tried to define the division in his own terms and to his own advantage. He covered up the divisions by characterising them as a difference of opinion in the same family of the Islamic Revolution. He attempted to recognise the disappointment of the Opposition and Mr Mousavi’s followers, but not their claims and went on to set the agenda of repression by defining all dissent on this score as the enemies of the Islamic Revolution. What he was unwilling to face was the fact that this division is a defining moment for the identity of that Islamic Revolution. By trying to diffuse the dissent with threats, he may have offered a hostage to fortune.

The demonstrators with their descent "to the wire", and Mr Mousavi himself who declares that he is willing to offer himself as a martyr to the cause, are fast discovering that the challenge to Mr Ahmadinejad’s victory is a challenge to the form and hierarchy of the Islamic Revolution itself.

One of Mr Mousavi’s supporters, as the election was in progress, declared that they, the moderates and modernisers, would win "because Persia has a tradition of the right and the truth that goes back 2,500 years".

His faith has an ironic side to it. He may not realise that the political system espoused by the Islamic Revolution, giving supreme power to an Ayatollah and a group of clerics, is not Islamic at all. It is an incorporation into Shia Islam of the tradition of the ruling Dasturs, the high priests of Zoroastrianism, who, in the pre-Islamic era of the Zoroastrian Sassanian Kings, arrogated political power to themselves, presided over a thought police and suppressed, sometime brutally, what they considered to be deviant heresies. History knocks twice?