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’)........

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