Pezeshkian as President: What Might this Mean for Iran and India

Election for the presidency of the Islamic Republic in Iran has brought into limelight the unlikely figure of Masoud Pezeshkian, who beat the arch-conservative Saeed Jalili in the run-off held on 5th July 2024. Winning by a good nine percentage points (53.7% over 43.3% of the total votes cast), Pezeshkian pulled off a victory that not many people anticipated before he won the first round on 28th June with a margin of little less than a million votes. Outcome of the election – brought forward nearly a year before schedule by the death of the incumbent President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in the month of May – has now not only surprised the international community, but also the Iranian establishment. It would not be altogether misplaced to argue that the election could be more significant than anyone is willing to suspect.

Surprise Victory of an Unlikely Victor

The 2024 election to the Presidency was broadly considered to be an affair settled in favour of candidates close to the Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamene‘i and sections of the hardline establishment, just as the last presidential election had been. As in 2021, all serious contenders sympathetic to the idea of reform had been denied clearance to run for the office by the Shourah-e Negahban (Guardians Council), and even renowned conservatives (like the former Speaker of the Majlis ‘Ali Larijani) and hardliners (like the former President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad) had their candidatures rejected. From all accounts, Saeed Jalili – an ultra-hardline member of the Majlis-e Khobregan (Assembly of Experts, the elected body that is responsible for the selection, supervision and removal of the Supreme Leader), a former nuclear negotiator and close confidante of the Supreme Leader – had been tipped to be enjoying the blessings of the deep state of the Islamic Republic and its Supreme Leader. The only other serious contender with support of some other sections of the establishment and the blessings of Khamenei, the speaker of the Majlis, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, had also been left in the fray.

However, pragmatists in the establishment were aware that the popular disaffection with the establishment had grown exponentially since the Hijab protests and their brutal subjugation in 2022-23, which largely robbed the Majlis elections of 2023 of their legitimacy courtesy the lowest turn-out ever. Hence, it seems to have been considered that the total absence of a reformist figure could botch the presidential elections as well with a very low turn-out, resulting in the solitary reformist figure left standing who was known for his personal and routine expressions of allegiance to the Supreme Leader – Masoud Pezeshkian.

Although little known outside, Pezeshkian (Azeri on his father’s side and Kurdish on his mother’s side) has been a regular figure in the lower echelons of the reformist circles. He had been the deputy minister (1999-2001) and then the Minister for Health (2001-05) in the cabinet of President Sayyid Mohammad Khatami; then a Member of the Majlis (MM, i.e. MP) for five successive terms, rising to be the deputy speaker of the Majlis during the reformist President, Hossein Rouhani. Although his political attainments so far have not had much public recognition, he has consistently marked himself out by ticking all the right boxes in the reformist causes for the last decade and a half – beginning with rejecting the validity of Ahmedinejad’s re-election to the president’s office in 2009 (widely considered to be the first instance of direct electoral manipulation in Iran); supporting President Rouhani’s nuclear deal of 2015 and removal of the international sanctions regime; criticizing the violent enforcement of the Hijab laws under President Raisi. During the debates among presidential candidates in June 2024, despite a lackluster performance, Pezeshkian stood out as the only candidate to denounce forcible implementation of the Hijab laws, and to speak in favour of returning to the negotiation table on the nuclear issue in order to bring an end to the economic sanctions’ regime (which he identified as a zaroorat-e wajudi, i.e. an existential imperative).

During the first round of the voting itself, the turnout indicated that unlike former Presidents Khatami and Rouhani (who had won both their respective terms by landslides), Pezeshkian did not enjoy the support of all the major segments of the reformist camp. His victory appears to have been motivated by an unprompted (therefore, spontaneous) public rejection of the hardline candidate Jalili, and a (seemingly uncoordinated) determination to keep the latter out. However, it may have helped that just a few days before the first round of voting, the foreign minister of Rouhani’s cabinet and one of the architects of the nuclear deal — Javad Zarif – was revealed to be Pezeshkian’s advisor on foreign policy, and that both the reformist Presidents Khatami and Rouhani had put their weights behind the mild-mannered former heart surgeon. Once Pezeshkian romped home with over 44% of the votes in the first round, many people who initially seemed to have been resigned to another hardline President were suddenly galvanized into turning out – witnessing a jump of nearly 50% for the votes cast (rising from 10.3 million to nearly 16 million votes). Even then, with the total turnout being at just below 49.8% of the electorate, this presidential election marked the second lowest voter turn-out ever (next only to 2021) since 1979, suggesting this was not so much of endorsement of Pezeshkian’s reformist credentials as of popular determination to defeat the establishment candidate Jalili.

The Putative Agenda of the Pezeshkian administration – Reformism’s Next Wave?

Owing to the tenuous nature of Pezeshkian’s victory, and the fact that neither his candidature nor his election seems to carry the ringing endorsements of the reformist agenda that have characterized his reformist predecessors, it is difficult to anticipate whether Pezeshkian’s tenure in office would actually be able to usher in the next wave of reformism in Iranian politics. Another factor that may work against such a possibility is that in the twenty-five-plus years since Khatami took the office, the institutional complex of the Islamic Republic has been virtually captured by that section of the revolutionary generation and beneficiaries of the revolution that are opposed to the reformist agenda of ‘re-founding’ the Republic. With the Majlis, the Assembly of Experts, the Guardians Council, the Judiciary and the Supreme National Security Council (Shourah-ye ‘Ali-ye Amniat-e Melli) – all being progressively dominated by regime hardliners aligned with the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, reformist agenda has been successively stone-walled ever since the end of the Iraq war. Thus, observers of Iranian politics are not particularly effusive just yet about the prospects of reformism during the era of Pezeshkian.

An early indication of whether the incoming administration is going to be of a reformist orientation or not would be seen in the selection of ministers to the cabinet sent for approval by the Majlis. Ministers who have served under either Khatami or Rouhani administrations (or both), or politicians who belong/once belonged to loose reformist alliances (such as the Mosharekat, the Kargozaran, or the E’tedal o Ta‘usieh) would flag the return of the reformist agenda.

Another, and perhaps a clearer, indication of the nature of the administration would be at the time of the approval of the cabinet of ministers by the Majlis. In the Iranian system, the mere nomination of a minister to the cabinet by the President is not enough. Each of these ministers have to be then approved by the Majlis after hearings, which have often been close to grilling sessions in the past. In the past, reformist presidents have been denied ministers of their choice and have been foisted with others by the Majlis – Khatami himself was removed from the cabinet of President Rafsanjani by the Majlis. A friendly Majlis (such as those President Khatami had till 2003, or as Raisi had in 2021) allows the President a free hand. In case of a hostile Majlis, the incoming administration is forced to accommodate people from either across the political spectrum, or people without any clear factional track-record (as had been the case with both Rouhani’s administrations). Given the make-up of the present hardliner-dominated Majlis, Pezeshkian might have it tougher to accommodate died-in-the-wool reformists in his cabinet. If he is allowed reformists without any existing alignment (such as Javad Zarif), he might still be able to return Iran to the reformist agenda. If the Majlis is determined to be obstructive they may even force Pezeshkian to accept cabinet members closer to the hardline establishment, in which case the incoming administration may not be very much more effective than Raisi had been, operating in tandem with the Iranian deep state.

One reason that Pezeshkian’s candidature had not aroused much enthusiasm in the reformist camp was because he had not come with a clear reformist agenda to start with – except for his opposition to forceful implementation of mandatory hijab and his support for the renegotiation of the nuclear deal in order to have the sanctions regime ended. The latter however, could be indicative broadly of a position similar to Rouhani (i.e. avoid political reforms for the time being, focus on the embattled economy instead), and is quite likely to set the tone for the administration in the months and years to come.

The Iranian economy has been living with economic sanctions off and on right from 1979, but the sanctions regime became particularly harsh since 2003, when Tehran’s nuclear programme came under the scanner. Since 2010, the sanctions regime became veritably crippling on account of its posture of defiance on the nuclear issue, reducing Iran’s exchanges with other countries to a level that was historically at its lowest. The hardliners in Iran are the principal beneficiaries of this sanction-ridden economy, enjoying a stranglehold over much of the productive potential of the country’s industrial capacity (one of the three largest in the Middle East) through their collective control over the economic foundations (bonyad-ha), which are among the principal stakeholders of Iran’s manufacturing sector. Enjoying access to financial allocations from the countries budget, the foundations are meant to ensure uninterrupted production in sectors reckoned to be crucial for state and regime security. Dominated by the revolutionary paramilitary organs of the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Inqilab-e Islami (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, i.e. IRGC) and the reservist militia of the Basij (to a lesser extent), the foundations represent that component of the Iranian economy which have devised the strategy of the resistance economy (Iqtisad-e Moqawwamati), specializing in devices such as sanctions busting. In the last decade and a half, this group – constituting the core of the hardline establishment – has progressively gained in military might abroad (chiefly in the neighbourhood, represented by the Qods force of the IRGC, associated with the late Qasem Soleimani), as well as political clout at home (reflected in their steadily growing dominance of the Majlis). This component of the Iranian deep state had resisted meaningful nuclear negotiations during the Ahmadinejad administration, had tried to stonewall those under Rouhani before the JCPOA of 2015, and decided to accelerate the pace of development of Iran’s nuclear programme after USA pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. Even as sanctions returned to blight the Iranian economy yet again, the protagonists of the resistance economy have persisted in their posture of defiance.

For the average person on the street though, the economic sanctions have unleashed nothing but misery. Quite apart from woes of the Iranian oil sector (which requires both capital infusion and technology import from abroad), the sanctions regime has severely undermined the manufacturing capacity of the private sector, and has also made overseas trade an extremely difficult proposition. With commodities as basic as diapers vanishing from the shelves, the flourishing parallel economy has pushed prices of commodities of daily use exponentially upwards. This veritable siege of the Iranian economy by the sanctions regime had previously pushed the bazaaris (the traditional commercial sector, bedrock of support of traditional conservatives like Larijani) into a tactical alignment with the reformist camp during the first Rouhani administration, and helped in securing Khamenei’s support for the 2015 nuclear deal (thereby off-setting the hardline opposition that was otherwise virtually guaranteed). Pezeshkian seems well-positioned to aim for a return to a similar social coalition with limited aspirations of removing the sanctions regime, if Khamenei chooses to bless the venture.

However, the return to a nuclear deal of the kind signed by the Obama administration in 2015 appears highly unlikely at present. The 2015 deal was premised on the Iranian nuclear programme being sent to a deep freeze for a period of ten years, followed by economic rehabilitation of Iran in the global economic order – all on the presumption that after ten years of such rehabilitation, the price for Tehran’s return to a nuclear programme would be too costly to be deemed acceptable. However, since US pull-out from the JCPOA, Iran has come considerably closer to developing weapons capability with a much-reduced break-out time in 2024 than earlier. Thus, a simple return to 2015 deal is ruled out. A far more comprehensive deal with Iran’s nuclear programme being sent back to the freezer, as also a moratorium on Iran’s missile development, which the USA would now want in place (be it under a second Biden administration or that of Trump) would be an extremely hard-sell for the hardline establishment in the Islamic Republic. The best-case scenario could thus be the initiation of a broad range of back-channel talks concentrating on confidence building measures – such as reducing the heat around the Gaza conflict (viz. by putting the leash on Hezbollah and the Houthis, in return for the US persuading Israel to seriously engage with the two-state solution). Should that work, Tehran could meaningfully start talking about its nuclear and missile programmes alike (which would still remain hard-sell, but less inconceivable than now). But all bets would be off for this scenario if the Gaza conflict broadens to a regional scale with escalation on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon – in such a scenario, Pezeshkian’s hand as much as those of the Supreme Leader would be tied, and Tehran may have to intervene in favour of Hezbollah, and thereby may be even triggering a larger conflict in the region.

The more politically risky venture for Pezeshkian (but the one likelier to return higher dividends) would be to reverse the hardline position on mandatory hijab. While the hardliner dominated Majlis has favoured the more stringent position on mandatory hijab, Pezeshkian has already gained a resonance among the masses by batting for a more relaxed order. Husband to a (deceased) successful gynaecologist, and father to an accomplished daughter who is working in the petrochemical sector, Pezeshkian has opposed mandatory veiling (which, he argues, should be left to the person concerned). He was quite vocal in rejecting the official medical statement on the cause of Mahsa Amini’s death – which was quite bold for an incumbent opposition parliamentarian. The pragmatists of the establishment in Tehran have already been arguing for a relaxation of the mandatory hijab laws since the turbulent months of 2022-23, but were thwarted by the hardliner-dominated judiciary with whom the former President Raisi was closely aligned. In absence of Raisi, the judiciary may continue with its hardline dispensation, but if Pezeshkian chooses to rein in the Gasht-e Ershad (generally known as the Morality Police), and stands the mainstream police force down from reporting infringement of hijab laws to the courts, the judiciary would not be effective in taking such infringements up suo moto. This can happen only if Pezeshkian enjoys the support from Khamenei, which he might – considering Pezeshkian’s threat potential for Khamenei is at present bordering on non-existent. Should Pezeshkian win the tussle over mandatory hijab laws, his popular support would grow and might gain him the leverage he needs inside the Iranian deep state for effective negotiations with the stake-holders on all issues ranging from economic to foreign policy, from nuclear programme to the sanctions regime. This is a long shot, but a shot nevertheless.

India’s Prospects under the Incoming Administration

India has been historically one of the steadiest customers of Iranian crude, and till 2010 had been one of the principal destinations for refining Iranian crude and sending it back for use in the Islamic Republic. India had to reluctantly disengage from Iran gradually since sanctions regime of 2010 pushed the cost of doing business with Tehran quite high, but New Delhi was again happy to resume when the JCPOA was signed in 2015. When the USA pulled out, India had to reduce her crude purchase from Iran yet again with some reluctance. Given the fact of India’s high energy requirements, it is in India’s long-term interest of energy security to return to the market for Iranian crude, sooner rather than later.

India has generally had it quite good with reformist administrations – from Khatami to Rouhani. Beginning from the time of the (now abandoned) Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, reformist administrations have generally sought to give India greater leverage in Iran’s foreign relations in order to develop a counter-weight to China. This is borne out by the fact that even though India eventually bowed out of the project, Beijing’s interest in replacing Indian in the project did not lead anywhere during the hardline administration of Ahmadinejad, largely owing to resistance from a number of reformist functionaries in the establishment. Even after the JCPOA, when Tehran went on an overdrive courting western countries seeking their involvement in the Islamic Republic, India was one of the earliest partners that Tehran wanted to develop deeper engagements with – borne out by the first agreement on Chabahar in 2016. The reformist and pragmatist elements in the Iranian establishment were also pivotal in thwarting the desire of hardliners during Ahmadinejad era to penalize India for its growing proximity with the West.

India’s relations with the Islamic Republic have improved significantly since the last reformist administration left office. During the Raisi era, India’s support for Tehran’s induction into the SCO as a full member and the BRICS as a new member has won India Tehran’s gratitude. India also returned to the task of development of the Chabahar port for a period of ten years, after a hiatus caused by the return of the sanctions’ regime in 2018. Just as importantly, India’s decision to stand by her old friend Russia, if necessary, at the expense of her burgeoning ties with the West has won New Delhi some new admirers among hardliners in Iran (who are operating in close alignment with Moscow). India’s willingness to work even with the various economic foundations associated with the IRGC in ventures such as Chabahar and the South Pars oil-fields appear to have further contributed to India’s increased acceptability in Iran’s hardline circles.

In the event that Pezeshkian manages to steer Iran away from an escalation of the Gaza conflict, it would take a good deal of time for him to stage a return to a deal with the West and still more time to reopen Iran for business. In the run-up to that stage, New Delhi is well positioned to gain from increased dealings with Tehran, currently having friends on both sides of the Iranian establishment – both in the incoming Iranian administration, and the hardline opposition. Indeed, in its last year, the Rouhani administration had concluded a treaty with Beijing that promised to allow China emerge as a major player in the development of infrastructure in the Islamic Republic, but for all practical purposes that agreement has remained a dead-letter because of considerable reservations entertained by Iranian reformists, pragmatists and hardliners alike. New Delhi’s acceptance levels in Iran being what they are currently, it is perfectly possible for India to wriggle even into this domain at the expense of China. If India is to persevere, and be prepared to engage more with Tehran overcoming the prospect of the strategic obstacle posed by US sanctions regime, the pickings promise to be rich under the incoming administration.

Conclusion

It is too early in the day to work out which particular direction Iran’s President-elect, Masoud Pezeshkian, is likely to go. There has been little clarity on what the Supreme Leader Khamenei thinks of him, except to say that any attempts at rapprochement with the West would be seen through the same lens of suspicion as were similar such attempts by other reformists in the past. If the Supreme Leader would defer to the popular mandate (however small) and allow Pezeshkian assume his office without the baggage of Khamenei’s hostility, even then in normal circumstances, he would have had his task cut out in simply passing his cabinet through the Majlis, dominated as it was by his political adversaries. The divide in the country opened up by the aftermath of Mahsa Amini affair needs a healing touch, which Raisi had failed to provide. If Pezeshkian proves able to lend that healing touch, the political capital he can potentially earn would offset the marginal nature of his mandate.

It is, thus, worth its while to invest in the incoming administration.

(The paper is the author’s individual scholastic articulation. The author certifies that the article/paper is original in content, unpublished and it has not been submitted for publication/web upload elsewhere, and that the facts and figures quoted are duly referenced, as needed, and are believed to be correct). (The paper does not necessarily represent the organisational stance... More >>