Will Khamenei dump Ahmedinejad? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — Although both of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s victories in the 2004 and 2009 presidential races were courtesy of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the wily Ayatollah may be preparing to remove a head of state that has become an international cartoon and a domestic embarrassment.

Those who have worked closely with Ahmedinejad claim that his decision to appoint the brilliant – if abrasive – Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei as his deputy was cleared informally by the Supreme Leader, as was Mashaei's reference last year to the "Jewish people" as friends of Iran – for which he has been widely criticized.

Indeed, both the Arab and the Persian people have a much better record of treatment of the Jewish minority than states in Europe such as Poland and Germany. Until Khomeinism became the state religion in 1979, Jews had an honored place in Iran and contributed disproportionately to business.

Even Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s first Supreme Leader, forbore from targeting the Jewish people as such, reserving his verbal venom for the state of Israel. Even today, several thousand Iranians belonging to the Jewish faith live in Iran, and apart from the storm trooper brigade represented by organizations such as the Revolutionary Guard, few Iranians look askance at what is an educated and liberal community, proud of their Iranian heritage.

Khamenei Turns on Khomeini's Own (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — When Iran’s Assembly of Experts chose Ali Khamenei as the country’s Supreme Leader on June 4, 1989, it was because he was seen as a "consensus" man. After a decade under Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader – a title he created to ensure that the clerics would dominate Iran – people were fatigued by the austere leader's style and his air of near infallibility.

The country had been through the cauldron of war with Iraq and was bleeding and in disarray. Earlier, as president of Iran, Khamenei had impressed many with his willingness to consult a wide range of people and to give precedence to the views of experts over those of the more impulsive clerics.

Indeed, he was not even an ayatollah – he was given the title only after Imam Khomeini passed away. Even so, several of the country's grand ayatollahs opposed the move, pointing to Khamenei's lack of significant theological contributions and to the fact that his role had been largely political.

These were ignored by the Assembly of Experts. They needed a Supreme Leader who would allow them the freedom to make the country functional again. In particular, Khomeini’s men rallied behind Khamenei, pointing out that the Imam had himself appointed Khamenei to lead Friday prayers in Tehran toward the second half of 1989.

For nearly a decade the new Supreme Leader kept a low profile, in contrast to his predecessor. He allowed the elected government a genuine say in the administration of Iran, and reined in clerics who were eager to resume the dominance they enjoyed under Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.

Khomeinist Iran Turns to Pakistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — The Shiite branch of Islam is regarded as heresy by followers of the founder of Wahabbism, Abdel Wahab (1703-1792). Extreme adherents of this faith routinely visit violence on the Shiites, and every one of its preachers condemns the Shiites as un-Islamic.

However, the 1979 ascendance of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to absolute power in Iran meant the capture of one of the geopolitical pivots of the Shiite world – the other being Iraq – by a thinker whose teachings closely resembled the philosophy of Abdel Wahab.

These ideas had originally been designed to counter the control exercised by Turkish Sufi doctrine over the Arab Bedouin. The Wahabbis enjoyed the support of the British Empire and its successor in international reach, the United States, initially because this alienation from Turkish influence suited their interests.

This backing began to be withdrawn only after 9/11. Nearly nine years after that event, the prising away of Wahabbis from the state structures of key Muslim-majority states has been at best partial, and usually no more than cosmetic. Wahabbism continues to dominate the world of Muslim religious schools and sites by ensuring the elimination of clerics and scholars who subscribe to a moderate – if not Sufi – worldview.

Nowhere has this process secured deeper roots than in Pakistan. Apart from some locations in the Middle East and North Africa, Pakistan has become the most significant jihadi factory, turning out thousands each year. Education in the religious schools, or madrassas, is based on vilification of those not subservient to a Wahabbi mindset. Even regular school education in Pakistan has aped models in the "moderate" Middle East by including heavy doses of religion in what ought to be secular curricula.

Two Responses to Terror (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat 

MANIPAL, India, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Although both are democracies, Israel and India are polar opposites in their response to "asymmetrical" warfare -- also known as terrorism. While India until now has consistently adopted a soft -- some would say soggy -- policy toward the Pakistani army's tactics of using jihadis to weaken India socially, militarily and economically, Israel has almost invariably responded with force to similar tactics by Hamas, Hezbollah and other jihadist organizations that seek to attack the Jewish state.

In both Lebanon and Gaza, Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively, have not concealed the fact that they regard themselves as being at war with Israel. Those who voted for either certainly must have understood that the coming to office of these two military formations would mean war with Israel, a conflict in which both sides would be expected to deploy the forces available to them. The citizens of Lebanon are now discovering the likely consequences if they elect Hezbollah to power, the way Gazans did with Hamas in the last election.

While Shiite Hezbollah depends almost entirely on Iran for its resources and on Syria for infrastructural support, Sunni Hamas gets funding from well-wishers across the world, including a number in Europe and North America who route their contributions through safe channels. Although accurate estimates are difficult, an average of four informed guesstimates puts the Iranian contribution at 35 percent of the total funds made available to Hamas.

U.S. Tilt Cools India-Iran Ties (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Tehran, Iran — While Sonia Gandhi prefers the European Union, Manmohan Singh's favorite country is the United States. Both as India's finance minister from 1992-96 and from 2004 onwards as prime minister, Singh has been open in his belief that a Washington-set agenda is in his country's best interest.

Sadly for him, few share this view, with the result that his efforts at implementing the Bush team's prescriptions for India have stalled on opposition within Parliament, even though Sonia Gandhi has managed thus far to silence dissent within Singh's own Congress Party, and has backed the prime minister in his U.S.-centered policies.

Largely as a result of the perception that he is following Tony Blair in the role of White House poodle, several countries otherwise friendly to India have distanced themselves from the Sonia-led regime now precariously in office. Russia made Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee undergo the indignity of a body search at Moscow airport recently, while Vladimir Putin declined to find the time to meet with visiting Indian Defense Minister A. K. Antony.

Moscow's mood has not been improved by Manmohan Singh's second rebuff of Russia's efforts to sign a nuclear deal with India that would enable the country to import four more nuclear reactors from Moscow. The move would cut into the potential profits being factored in by U.S. corporations eager to enter the Indian nuclear energy sector on advantageous terms.

Once again his foes help Ahmedinejad (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has this in common with U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: he too speaks directly to God. Admirers consider him to be the pilot heralding the imminent return of the Mahdi, the expected Muslim Messiah.

Less undiscerning observers consider the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran to be a buffoon, without any substantive authority inside his own country -- where the key members of the government report directly to Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei -- and with a diminishing support base within his own people, caused by the extreme economic mismanagement of the mullahs.

A country that ought to have enjoyed a prosperous standard of living for its 78 million people has huge pools of extreme poverty, caused by a dysfunctional system reminiscent of India during the three decades from 1955-85 of comprehensive central planning. What passes for private industry in Iran is a collection of enterprises run like feudal fiefs by those close to the supreme leader, or regarded by him as potential troublemakers needing to be pampered out of opposition.

Ahmedinejad himself came to power Iran-style, where the counted ballots threw up -- not entirely coincidentally -- the very result favored by Khamenei, who saw the current Iranian president as a poodle who would not stray from total obedience the way Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani did during his term. Unfortunately for the wily supreme leader, Ahmedinejad began to get delusions of divine greatness within a year, even while proving inept in supervising the system in a manner that would give the people of Iran enough crumbs to remain quiescent.

Unloosing the Shiite Genie (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — If protecting the homeland is among the primary responsibilities of a government, attempting to change the distribution of power within another country may not always be congruent with such an objective.

Given the state of conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982, there was a compelling case for the Israel Defense Forces to enter Lebanon and take out Palestinian assets that were being deployed against the stability and survival of the state of Israel. However, there was none for attempting to bolster the position of the Maronite Christians vis-à-vis their Shiite opponents. In particular, the leading Maronite Gemayel family was known for the use of methods that could have been developed in a concentration camp.

Since 1982, the flow of covert and other support to the Gemayels from Israel grew to a level that infuriated the Shiites as well as the family's many Maronite critics. By 1987, an isolated -- indeed hated -- PLO was able to secure the backing of key elements among the Shiite factions in Lebanon, despite being overwhelmingly Sunni.

From that time to the present, Israel has enjoyed the distinction of being the only non-Muslim country targeted by militant Shiites -- a group far more virulent and effective, albeit as yet limited in strength and scope, than even Wahabbi extremists such as members of al-Qaida. Over the past two decades, Israel has concentrated its attention and resources on tackling a foe that went into action as a result of its own intervention policy in Lebanon.

Why India Will Sit out Iran (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is solicitous of perceived U.S. interests, and has been working to create an alliance between the world's two biggest democracies, geopolitical logic will dictate that New Delhi will sit out a future Iran conflict, rather than follow its instincts and back the United States.

In evidence that India-Iran strategic ties remain in good standing, the chief of the Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral S. Kouchaki, is on a March 4-9 visit to India, during which he will visit key installations and discuss joint exercises.

The reasons for India to avoid conflict with Iran are primarily four:

First is the Shiite factor. There have been a little over 17,000 Muslim-Hindu clashes since India became independent in 1947, of which less than two hundred involved Shiites and Hindus. Almost all such clashes have been Sunni versus Hindu, and 87 percent of these have been Wahabbi-Hindu, as the more moderate sections of Sunni Muslim society seldom adopt a confrontational posture with their Hindu neighbors.

Oil Conspiracy Theory (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPUR, India, May 31 (UPI) -- Nature and the "street" both abhor a vacuum, and even after Sept. 11, 2001, it is those active in the "War of Revenge Against the Crusades" who are more adept at crafting tales designed to link the United States with the unemployment, rage and perception of helplessness that provides recruits to the jihad.

While conspiracy theories that seek to "prove" that the United States -- together with those familiar villains, the "Zionists" -- is engaged in a war against Islam, thus far such street gossip has permeated only the Muslim countries, principally Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. The rest of the world has not been infected with this virus.

Indeed, a case can be made that the United States is more popular today in the poorer parts of the globe than it is in Europe. Unlike the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the United States was the target of the resentments and insecurities felt by those recently freed from colonization, from the time cable television spread in the mid-1980s,"street" perceptions of the United States outside the Muslim world have improved steadily. In the words of Jairam Ramesh, an Indian economist, while the cry may still be "Yankee, go home!", to this is added, "but take me with you."

For a superpower, the United States has been demonstrably inept in factoring in psychological attitudes and reflexes in countries visited by U.S. "experts" only in the safety of air-conditioned hotel and conference rooms. Thus, in Iraq the United States appointed an American "administrator" and Iraqi "advisers," when common sense would have indicated that it ought to have been the other way around.

Iran's Unlikely Champion (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, March 23 (UPI) -- Unlike its Sunni counterpart, the theology of which has often been used by autocrats to profess a divine sanction for their license, Shiite Islam had at its theological core the concept of the separation of mosque from state.

The philosophy was clear that until the 12th imam of legend returned from his occultation to take over governance, the clergy were to leave temporal matters alone. It took nearly a thousand years for this tradition to get diluted when, in 1501, the Safavids installed Shiite Islam as the religion of the state.

Almost a half a century later, the Shiite tradition of separation of temporal from spiritual got wholly subverted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who implemented his innovation of a "Velayet-i-Faqih." He -- in the same way as Sunni rulers -- had "divine" sanction to run the administration the way he saw it. This perversion of genuine Shiite tradition has resulted in a crisis of identity in Iran, where those who can be accurately described as "Khomeinist" rather than Shiite or even Muslim rule in the name of the creed they have rendered unrecognizable from its roots.

Given the tension that has existed between Shiite and Sunni Islam from the death of the Prophet Mohammad in AD 632, it is remarkable how closely "Khomeinism" follows in its chemistry and practices a like perversion of Sunni Islam that was invented by Abdul Wahhab, who died in the 18th century, and has now supplanted Islam as the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

The Eagle Spreads its Wings (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- Since partial economic liberalization freed the Indian economy from the "Nehru" rate of growth -- 2 percent -- India has escaped from the South Asia box designed for it by China and its former Cold War adversary, the United States.

At the same time, Pakistan, with a real economy nine times smaller, is no longer able to generate enough torque to pin India down through sub-continental squabbles.

In the early 1990s, Kashmir represented around 50 percent of India's security problems. Today, that share of the Pakistani army's project has dipped to 20 percent.

China, insurgent bases in Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh and the danger of proliferating Hindu and Muslim extremist groups has overtaken that unhappy vale, while the Pakistani military establishment appears determined to battle India to the last Kashmiri.

This freedom from fear of defeat in Kashmir has led what I describe as the Indian strategic eagle to spread its wings.

Geopolitically, India approximates an eagle with its torso over the country, one wing-stretching out toward the Middle East and Central Asia and the other positioned over Southeast Asia.

One talon is grounded in southern Africa, while the other locates itself in prospective partner Indonesia.

The head of the eagle is turned toward Tibet and Yunnan, two Chinese provinces with significant past and future cultural and economic synergy with India. 

That eagle is now spreading its wings.