Iran is a land of paradoxes, contrasts and contradictions. Consider a few.

Last fortnight, I made a brief trip to Iran, my second visit there within a year. Over the past year, Iran’s political, cultural and human rights situation has visibly deteriorated. There is fear in the streets as thousands of women are rounded up for wearing skimpy or colourful headscarves.

Universities have recently witnessed purges of secular and progressive teachers. Tehran University now has an Ayatollah as its chancellor—for the first time ever. Schoolteachers have been rounded up in the hundreds for demanding better working conditions. Many teachers’ union officials were close supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad two years ago. Today, they oppose him.

Iran’s growing feminist movement has suffered the worst onslaught of all for daring to launch a campaign to collect a million signatures on a petition demanding amendments to the Constitution, and changes in laws and procedures that will promote a degree of gender equality.

For instance, women are barred from certain positions in government and the professions. Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace, was once a judge. But under a new “Islamic” law, which bars women from becoming judges, she had to suffer the humiliation of working under her junior as a clerk.

Scores of women activists have been arrested for launching the one-million-signatures petition. Two of them have been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on vague charges like “conspiracy and disrupting national security”.

A new climate of censorship is visible in elite bodies which were relatively immune from it so far. Take the Iranian Artists’ Forum, the kind of institution any country would be proud of. Situated in the heart of Tehran, the Forum is a lively, pulsating place, with auditoria, seminar rooms and exhibition halls, at which exciting events in Iran’s flourishing art world happen. It displays stunning modern sculptures and photographs and is home to one of the world’s best puppet theatres.

The Forum exudes freedom and creativity. Not many developing countries have a comparable arts complex inspired by liberal multiculturalism and pluralism.

Hundreds of young people throng the Forum, a redesigned military barracks located right next door to the long-closed down United States embassy. Its tastefully done ground-floor coffee shop is fully vegetarian and serves “chapatti bread”, besides sandwiches, pizzas, soft drinks and teas (including ayurvedic tea). Why, it even offers “Gita Set” and “Lotus Set” thalis!!

The Forum too, tragically, is becoming a target of censorship. Last fortnight, it hosted the release of a special issue of a remarkable magazine, “International Gallerie”, published from Mumbai, is devoted to Iran’s contemporary culture. But the Forum management turned down requests to hold a vocal music performance as part of the event, and also disallowed the display of some posters based on the issue.

“It’s not that the management favours censorship”, an art critic told me, while insisting on anonymity. (Nobody wants to be quoted in Iran for fear of harassment). “But it’s being closely watched by the Ministry of Culture. The management is walking the knife’s edge. If it’s to keep the institution running, it must not do or say anything critical of the regime—or risk closure. It ends up practising self-censorship.”

Similarly, young students’ haunts like “Café 78” in Tehran’s Aban Street have been shut down. This is where radical students, both female and male, would hang out and chat animatedly about avant-garde art, music, theatre, Che Guevara, politics, whatever.

“Iran has never been like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan”, a sociologist said to me. “We have never had that kind of orthodoxy and rigidity in our Islam, which is more ritual-based than doctrine-driven. But now, the mullahs are playing havoc and trying to put Iran into a rigid, dogmatic mould.”

None of this is going down well with the youth. Iran has one of the world’s youngest populations, which is fairly strongly exposed to other cultures and aspires to freedom. Iranians interact closely with the West through the two million Iranian expatriates who live in North America and Western Europe, through the Internet, and through popular culture, including Hollywood, Bollywood, jeans and fast food.

However, the public is unable to influence political processes much. The reformists in the government are weaker than they were just a year ago, and unable to exercise moderating influence despite the growing unpopularity of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad whose candidates were badly defeated in last year’s elections.

It’s as if the best-known reformists had been “neutralised” by being accommodated in various official bodies such as the National Expediency Council (Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani) or by being asked to act as Iran’s special envoys abroad (Mohammed Khatami).

“The isolation of the moderates and reformists represents a tragedy for Iran and marks a halt to its gradual evolution towards more openness and freedom,” says a graphic artist and calligrapher, who refuses to be named. “If the present trend continues, Iran will be doomed. And yet, there are no shortcuts to democratisation, least of all externally induced ones. This society has to evolve its own methods and means to free itself of this repressive culture, and move forward.”

What explains the present climate? The social scientists I spoke to identify four broad factors. A first, short-term, cause lies in the Security Council sanctions on Iran, imposed for its nuclear programme. These have had an adverse economic impact—on top of high inflation (currently 13.2 percent), unemployment (officially said to be 10 percent, but believed to be much higher), and moderate GDP growth (5 to 6 percent). Ahmedinejad has been accused by his own colleagues of profligate spending, in particular, very nearly running through the $40 billion special fund created from oil revenues.

The government’s biggest worry is that Iran’s economy is unable to absorb the 75,000 young people who enter the labour market each year. So it’s toying with desperate solutions, such as rampant privatisation of the state and quasi-state companies which dominate Iran’s economy.

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an executive order to privatise 80 percent of these enterprises over the next 10 years. This is likely to aggravate the employment situation through a “downsizing” of the workforce.

Even more significant than the sanctions’ economic impact is their political effect: resentment at Iran’s unfair isolation for what’s seen as a largely legitimate nuclear programme—despite some non-disclosures and minor infringements of International Atomic Energy Agency procedures.

Resentment and fear of victimisation have encouraged Tehran to become more, not less, repressive—as the Mossavian case shows. The detention of this former ambassador to Germany and chief negotiator on the nuclear issue under President Rafsanjani in 2005—when Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment in a deal with three European Union countries—appears to be related to an internal power struggle.

It coincides with the failure of Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki’s expected but never-to-be dinner meeting with Condoleezza Rice at Sharm-al-Sheikh in Egypt last weekend. Iran is probably signalling it is willing to toughen its stand on the nuclear issue.

The regime’s hardliners and conservatives are adept at drumming up a nationalist response whenever the West threatens them. Their twin slogans for the year are: “Islam and the Nation”. Britain played straight into Iranian hardliners’ hands when its sailors entered Iran’s waters in March. Their release for humanitarian reasons was a public relations coup for Tehran.

Western pressure is generating the opposite of its intended effect—not least because of Iran’s bitter memories of the West’s interference, bullying and betrayal, especially the CIA’s toppling of elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Washington’s imposition of the Shah dictatorship, which it supported to the bitter end until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

A second factor behind the present climate of repression is the need for “regime maintenance”. The strategy is to periodically crack the whip to assert the Islamic-clerical basis of government. This probably reflects shifting balance-of-power inside Iran’s ruling apparatus in favour of the conservatives vis-à-vis the reformists, who have been politically weakened.

Third, the internal shift within the regime reflects a generational change. Many of the cadres who took the initiative in organising the mass mobilisations that led to 1979 Revolution were then in their 20s. They have grown into ambitious middle-aged leaders and now demand a share of power.

The locus of their struggle has shifted from the street to high offices. Ahmedinejad’s election in 2005 represented this shift, as well as the growing aspirations of the rural/semi-urban poor and lower middle classes in whose name he speaks. It is remarkable that unlike other presidents, he holds his cabinet meetings in small towns and tries to respond to local problems.

Yet, his popularity is now on the decline because of the economic situation and because he is seen as irresponsible. He may not have another chance, especially if another conservative leader emerges. But while he is in power, curbs on freedom are likely to prevail.

A fourth factor is related to Iran’s growing self-assertion and its claims to regional leadership in West Asia, especially because of the US’s huge losses in Iraq and its failure to stabilise the situation there. Many policy-makers in Tehran feel that Iran is destined to gain power and influence in Shia-majority Iraq no matter whether it’s split along ethnic lines or not.

This has encouraged intransigence and a willingness to take greater domestic risks by increasing the level of repression. Western attempts to snub or corner Iran, or to talk down to it on the nuclear issue—as Rice was apparently planning to do over the dinner that Mottaki boycotted—will tend to further harden this approach.

Iran, then, may be in for a longish period of insecurity, curbs on freedom and rollback of democratic gains. A good deal of what happens will depend on Iran’s external relations, in particular its confrontation with the West on the nuclear programme.—end—

Iran is probably still some years away from a nuclear weapons capability. Contrary to Tehran’s claim that it is enriching uranium on an “industrial scale” with 3,000 gas centrifuges, the IAEA estimates it only has 1,300 centrifuges of a primitive kind and is nowhere near “industrial-scale” enrichment.

However, Iran is also exploring a second, relatively easier, route to acquiring a nuclear capability—based on plutonium. It is building a heavy water production plant at Arak, and near it, a small natural-uranium “research” reactor, which will be outside the scope of any international inspections.

Iran claims that it can master heavy water production, and (more credibly), that it can run the research reactor with indigenous uranium. If this is indeed true, then all Iran has to do is to reprocess the spent fuel to produce plutonium.

This is a remarkably simple process. But the long time that Iran has spent on building the heavy water plant generates scepticism. It may still be five to seven years from reprocessing enough spent fuel to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, comparable to, say, India’s in 1974.

To return to the uranium enrichment centrifuges, installed at Isfahan, it is unlikely that Iran has stabilised these delicate, fragile machines, which spin hexafluoride gas at enormous speeds like 1,000 revolutions per second and can break down under the slightest strain, seismic activity or material imbalance.

According to independent experts, Iran’s gas conversion facility at Natanz produces hexafluoride with high impurities. This probably makes enrichment near-impossible.

Iran is certain to accelerate its nuclear programme if it is threatened, taunted, derided and targeted through low-intensity military operations at its borders.

The world Iran sees around itself is deeply hypocritical: a handful of states which refuse to give up their nuclear weapons, or (like India, Israel and North Korea) are rewarded for having them, amidst the more than 180 countries which are held down to their pledges never to make them.

The U.S. encouraged the Shah’s Iran to build a 23,000-megawatt nuclear power programme and even offered it spent-fuel reprocessing facilities (which can double up for military use). Now, “rather like confirmed alcoholics complaining about teenage drinking”, as a commentator says, Iran cannot have enrichment even under strict IAEA inspections.

Iran is definitely willing, indeed keen, to negotiate nuclear restraint—without suspending its nuclear activities or without stipulations that it enriches uranium on foreign soil. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana has confirmed this.

This window of opportunity will soon slam shut. The West would be ill-advised to miss it—out of mulishness and prejudice. The more it corners Iran, the more intransigent will Tehran become.

In the long run, it will be impossible for the West to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons if it is really keen on doing so. Neither uranium enrichment nor plutonium production is so difficult that a mid-sized semi-industrial nation endowed with natural and economic resources cannot master it.

The real solution lies not in disarming Iran’s nuclear capability or programme by force, but in removing the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons—that is, in global nuclear disarmament. That alone will remove one of the fundamental cause of the resentment—hypocrisy and double standards—that drives nuclear programmes in many countries.

But will the world’s nuclear-addicted nations, less than 10 in number, muster the will to disarm their nuclear weapons? Or will we see more North Koreas and Irans going nuclear?