It was exactly forty-seven years ago, in January 1979, that Iran’s history took a revolutionary leap. The force of popular demonstrations forced the Shah into exile and a Shia revolution transformed the power architecture of the country. Is Iran today in the cusp of a similar change is the question dominating discussions amidst street-level demonstrations and protests whose intensity evokes memories of 1979 even as heavy coercive measures have led to reports of hundreds, even thousands, of fatalities.
Our own context forces us to acknowledge the real possibility of major change. Nepal in 2025, Bangladesh in 2024, Sri Lanka in 2022 remind us that we are in an era where popular protests harnessed with social-media magnification have enormous insurrectionary power.
Civic protest is not new to Iran. Periodically in the past two decades, large-scale mobilisations with a decidedly anti-government stance have recurred and have been put down with massive force and repressive measures. 2009 was dominated by the Green Movement: massive protests against the alleged rigging of a presidential election. The period from 2018 to 2021 saw repeated protests against the deteriorating economic conditions. In 2022-23, mass demonstrations and protests followed the death in custody of a young woman accused of violating Iran’s mandatory hijab or head-covering law.
Both the Green protest of 2009 and the anti-hijab protest of 2022-23 were then described as the most intense and the largest since 1979. The Iranian State had, however, demonstrated its resilience and huge capacities for employing coercive and repressive measures. It also became very clear that the State had
deep reservoirs of support and that the Iranian Establishment, in fact, was an ecosystem of a clerical and religious setup backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, forming a kind of State within the State.
What suggests that the fate of the current protests will be any different? Predictions are hampered by two factors. Firstly, information coming out of Iran is extremely limited due to a comprehensive internet blackout as also restrictions on phone calls; secondly, there is simultaneously an obvious disinformation campaign in place about the Iranian State tottering and being at its weakest. This emerges from Iranian diasporic and pro-monarchical groups, from US-based NGOs and other sources, and a variety of sources linked to Israeli intelligence.
Notwithstanding this opacity, it is clear that the current protests, which acquired a dramatic intensity from the end of December, are easily the most significant challenge Iran has faced since the 1979 revolution.
This is in part because the decline in the economic situation has been precipitous. Over the course of 2025, the value of the Iranian rial declined by almost 90% amidst high inflation, including in prices of food items. On December 28, when Iran’s trading and mercantile communities — the bazaar in short — shuttered their establishments, they were in effect joining the protests. It became clear that what was happening across the country had a different quality. Many recalled that the Shah’s position in 1979 had finally become untenable when the bazaar turned against him.
The government’s initial response to these protests was in part to recognise that genuine economic distress was at their root. But this domestic factor is overlaid with the complexities of an external geopolitics, which magnifies the challenge the government faces. Economic grievances and political alienation linked to corruption, nepotism and so on merge easily.
Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Iran’s external environment has deteriorated progressively. Beginning late 2024, Iran’s proxies and close allies — Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — have been severely battered by Israel. A further setback came with the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria in December 2024. Thereafter, in the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025, a number of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists were killed by Israeli strikes with an accuracy that clearly suggested Iran’s internal security had been severely compromised. Finally, the US’s and Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities severely damaged the latter’s nuclear programme.
All this has shattered Iran’s aura as a regional power. It has made its Establishment look deeply vulnerable. In this context, Donald Trump’s threats of taking action in case coercive measures are used by Iran against the protesters and the possibilities opened up by the US action in Venezuela impart a new intensity to the situation in Iran. US capacities of pin-pointed military strikes, cyber and intelligence subversion and, finally, economic strangulation are more pronounced today than at any time in the past. In a president not constrained either by convention or by international law, each of these is a major threat to the Iranian leadership.
Some have argued that fear of US action has, in fact, spurred the Iranian government to increase coercive and repressive measures to end the demonstrations as quickly as possible rather than try to gradually diffuse the situation. In the face of economic sanctions and continuous new measures being announced by the US to further isolate Iran in commercial and trading terms, the economic situation will continue to deteriorate. This means that no quick closure is likely.
There is no doubt that despite its many weaknesses, the Iranian Establishment still has deep roots of support. There are no signs so far of any serious dissidence within the ruling regime. At the same time, while the domestic Opposition is more energised and empowered than before, it lacks leadership and internal coherence. The monarchists — supporting the return of the former Shah’s son — appear more as diasporic activists than a symbol of domestic resistance and mobilisation.
The Iranian revolution in January 1979 had appeared to herald a fundamental change in Asian and global geopolitics and fault lines. Following it was the China-Vietnam border war in February-March, the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan in April, Saddam Hussein assuming the presidency of Iraq in July, the seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca by Islamic militants in November, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. These were largely unconnected events in 1979 but put together they irreversibly changed India’s external environment. At this time, we can only speculate if the current events in Iran will be a step towards something as transformative.
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former High Commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan
