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For most outsiders, the Iranian Revolution is a chapter in a history book; for Dhananjayan K Machingal, it was a lived political moment.
When news broke of the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 81-year-old from Thrissur in Kerala found himself watching television with a peculiar weight of memory. The memory of someone who holds a stake, however small, in one of the 20th century’s most seismic shifts, walking the streets of Iran, rubbing shoulders with Leftist opposition during the 1978 revolution.
“Now I watch the news to know updates from there, even though I have no one there now. Once, nearly 48 years ago I participated in Iran’s revolution,” Dhanajayan told TNM.
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a joint military attack on Iran, resulting in the death of Khamenei, who had served as the Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989. Israeli and US forces continue their assault on Iran, with the death toll now rising to 800 people.
The 1978 Iranian Revolution replaced Iran’s pro-Western monarchy with a theocratic Islamic Republic. The revolution began as a protest involving Leftist and Communist groups opposed to the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty, ultimately transforming into a revolution.
Long before he ever set foot in Iran, Dhananjayan had, as he puts it, "a habit of lining up under a red flag." As a young man in Kerala, he was an active member of the Students Federation, the precursor to the Student Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). A civil engineer by training, he was the kind of person who believed that politics was not something you watched from a distance.
“During the emergency, I was put in jail for organising protests. Later, after attaining a bail, I travelled to the Middle East for a job and reached Iran,” he said. He eventually landed in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province in northern Iran, some 350 kilometres from Tehran. He was in his early thirties, employed as a project manager on a township project for a private company.
It was there that he found himself, almost inevitably, back in the streets.
The protests that would become the Iranian Revolution were already stirring when Dhananjayan, in his early 30s, arrived. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty, faced mounting opposition from a wide coalition — labourers, students, leftists, and Islamists — united in their anger at his autocratic policies and his close alignment with the West. The Iranian Communist Party was among those leading marches in the streets.
For a Left sympathiser from Kerala, the pull was instinctive.
"I have this habit of lining up under a red flag, which has a hammer and sickle in white. So, I participated in a protest march," he recalls, with matter-of-factness..
He is careful to clarify that this was not organised participation. "It's not like having a meeting or deciding on a place to conduct a protest. My colleagues and I would just go and join the protest march in Rasht," he says. The revolution, at that point, still belonged to many voices — workers angry about wages, leftists angry about imperialism, ordinary people angry about the cost of living in a country that imported its food while sitting on oil.
However, the protests were taken over by religious clerics, who constitute the ruling elite of the Islamic Republic, established as a theocracy after the Revolution.
Later, as protests intensified, he lost his job when his company closed. He then temporarily moved to Tehran, the capital of Iran, where he lived with a few Malayali friends. “I lived in an apartment with seven or eight people; Atlas Ramachandran was also living with us during that time,” he said. Late MM Ramachandran, popularly known as Atlas Ramachandran, was a prominent NRI businessman from Kerala
“When in Tehran, I also used to go to see the protest and be part of it. The protests stemmed from many issues. From my understanding, the people are most affected by Shah’s policies of not cultivating the land but rather importing goods, including food items. It was a consumer society,” he said.
Although he stayed with seven or eight people, only two or three were interested in protests, as only a few believed this was a revolution against America and imperialism. He also shared a near-death experience during the revolution.
"Once in Tehran, the Mojahedin National Guards put a gun to our heads, but luckily we escaped," he said.
The revolution succeeded. In 1979, a national referendum established the Islamic Republic. A new constitution, built around the principle of Velayat-e Faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist, designated Ayatollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader with ultimate authority. It was not the revolution Dhananjayan had marched for.
Subsequently, the government demanded that foreigners leave the country. “We stayed there longer as flights were unavailable. During that time, Arafat was present there, and I managed to shake hands with him,” recalls Dhanjanayan, who worked in developing tourism prospects of Kerala as a businessman. Yasser Arafat was the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), who actively supported the anti-Shah revolutionaries in Iran. Following the revolution's victory, Arafat was the first foreign leader to visit Tehran in February 1979.
Later, Dhananjayan moved to Europe. He then married a German woman, and from 2008, they settled in Thrissur. His wife Dorothea passed away two years ago.