What Iranians in India think about the war and Tehran

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9 hours ago

For several nights this month, Nader Mohandesi stayed up till 2 am in his Bengaluru home watching television news about the war between Israel and his country, Iran. The 60-year-old surgeon was worried about his mother, who lives in the Iranian city of Shiraz.
Throughout the war, Mohandesi used to send a WhatsApp message on his family group chat every morning and wait for it to get delivered. 'We could not talk everyday because the internet connection in Iran was very weak,' he said. 'It was really stressful.'
Things were worse in Tehran, Iran's capital. An Iranian artist who lives in Delhi told Scroll that his parents and younger sister had to flee the city on the fifth day of the fighting.
'They locked up our house and went to my grandparents' home in the North-West of Iran,' said the artist who requested anonymity citing privacy concerns. Anxious and unable to sleep, the 38-year-old even considered flying to Turkey or Armenia and making his way to them by land. But his family dissuaded him.
'You go through more stress if you live outside,' he explained.
The Israel-Iran ceasefire, announced on Tuesday by United States President Donald Trump, brought relief to Mohandesi and the artist. But the two differed vastly on what had led their country to the brink. Their differences shed light on the schism in Iranian society.
'Is this karma?' asked Mohandesi as he walked to his clinic in Bengaluru on Monday. He was referring to the air strikes carried out by the US on three of Iran's nuclear sites the previous day.
Though the US has justified its attack by alleging that Iran was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency has found nothing to support this claim.
The surgeon, however, was clear that Iran's nuclear programme and the ideology supposedly underpinning it was to blame for its current predicament. 'For 45 years, they have been saying down with this country or that,' he added. 'What else did they expect?'
Soon after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran locked horns with the US, which had allowed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah, to visit America for medical treatment. While the monarch did not live for very long, the feud between the two countries has lasted ever since.
Mohandesi argued that the bitterness between Iran and the US had done no good to his homeland. He came to India in 1985 to study medicine and stayed on after falling in love with a college junior – a woman from Guwahati. The couple decided to build their lives together in Bengaluru.
Living in the Silicon Valley of India gave Mohandesi a ringside view of India's unfolding growth story even as Western sanctions were impeding the economic trajectory of his own country.
Now, he wanted Tehran to hold a referendum on continuing its nuclear programme. 'Our Constitution says that in difficult situations you must go to the people,' he reasoned.
The artist, on the other hand, dismissed all talk about nuclear weapons as eyewash. The US, in his view, was making a 'power play' in West Asia by attacking Iran. 'The world is an unfair place,' he said.
He first came to India over two decades ago with his parents, who had found work here. While they returned to Iran a few years later, he chose to stay because he was in the middle of college.
Over time, he found himself drawn to the world of Indian arts, which he likened to the environment he grew up in back home in Iran. 'If Iran is my father, India is my mother,' he joked.
He made it clear, though, that the nostalgia had not made him a regime apologist. He was critical of its economic policies, particularly the state of the Iranian Rial, its currency. Still, he appreciated the advances that his country had made in areas such as 'defence and medicine' since the revolution.
'Things don't happen overnight,' he contended. 'Sometimes, it takes one or two generations.'
In recent years, Iran has been rocked by women-led protests, most notably against compulsory veiling. In December, the country was considering the promulgation of a law which proposed death penalty for women refusing to veil themselves. But the artist held the protests as proof of democracy deepening in the country.
The one thing that the artist as well as the surgeon agreed on was the need for political reform in Iran. Both hoped that the recently concluded war would be a 'wake-up call' for the regime.
'I hope the regime sees that most people backed the country,' the artist said.
Mohandesi was less optimistic. He remembered having voted for the reformists in the elections of 1997 and 2001 only to be eventually disappointed by them.
'I thought something would happen,' he recalled. 'But the system is very rigid. It just does not give in.'
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The statement reportedly did not contain references to the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 that killed 26 persons.
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