While known political groups and religious personalities in Iran have not yet taken steps for the next parliamentary elections, except for the newly-created groups who have their eyes on the moderate seats in the 290-seat Majlis, news reports indicate that the few remaining critics in the Majlis will not find their way into the new assembly.

Signs indicate that there will be sweeping disqualifications of candidates to the next Majlis and unlimited and extensive oversight and monitoring through appointed bodies. In fact the fear of such oversight is so high that some suspect a replay of what the Guardian Council did during the elections for the seventh Majlis in 2004 which resulted in a lengthy sit-in protest by most of sitting reformist and independent representatives against the illegal actions of the Council.

In 2004, 139 Majlis deputies went on a hunger strike and ultimately resigned in protest to the disqualification of 3,500 candidates – well over half the total 4,679 – for the seventh Majlis. Many remember the results of the meeting of the president and speaker of the Majlis with the supreme leader, arranged with the goal of resolving the issue.

Eleven years have passed since that sit-in but many of those Majlis representatives are still in prison and from the leaders of those years, former president Mohammad Khatami is today banned from leaving the country as images too are banned from publication while former Majlis Speaker Mehdi Karoubi continues be under house arrest.

In that fateful meeting, after repeated warnings by the head of the judiciary and the majority of reformers to postpone unlawful elections, promises were made at the last hour that the disqualifications would be very limited and involve only a handful of reformist candidates concluding that it would be best if they voluntarily removed themselves from running.

But happened ultimately is that this promise was unilaterally thrown out and the complaint that then interior vice-minister Mostafa Tajzadeh had filed against Guardian Council’s Ahmad Janati ultimately landed him in a solitary prison cell for a long time.

Now today, while the majority of the reformist and independent deputes in the ninth Majlis have chosen to remain silent out of fear of facing the same fate their colleagues went through a decade ago, and after relegating the pursuit of their demands over the 2009 election issues to a respected conservative Majlis deputy named Ali Motahari, news comes that he is likely among candidates who will lose his credentials for his seat in the Majlis because of his views to free Mousavi, Karoubi and Rahnavard and also for his postures against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the favored president of ayatollah Khamenei, prospects that have prompted him to voluntarily withdraw himself from the race for the next Majlis.

There have been rumors that Motahari may actually be imprisoned, but because of possible public outrage at this which would be beyond the impact of imprisoning veteran revolutionary cleric Mohammad Beheshti’s son, the issue is now put on hold.

A cursory look at the moderate conservative media or the remarks of the Majlis deputies reveals that such fears – of rejection or arrest – are serious and widespread. One only needs to look at the request that Javad Karimi Ghodoosi, a Majlis member from the hardline steadfast faction has made from the presiding board of the assembly to re-examine the credentials of Motahari so as to not only bar him from the next Majlis but possibly remove him before the end of the term of this one.

Ghodoosi, who is a former Basij para-military force commander who slipped into the Majlis with less than ten percent of the votes of his constituents told a reporter, “I told Mr. Motahari that he would get a slap from people for his political positions and that his problems was that he had gone from school to university and then to the Majlis without having been part of the ups and downs of the revolution and, that even though he came from a martyr’s family, he lacked political vision.”

This threatening warning is indicative of a larger plan which was put into text in a Jahan News article which wrote this: “Mr. Dr Ali Motahari is a professor of philosophy and a thinker with experience in cultural affairs but now that he has come to this position, we advise him in a brotherly fashion to distance himself from politics, even if it is for the sake of his martyred father to whom we are indebted.”

The other side of this coin are the positions that hardliner Ahmad Tavakoli has been taking. Alef website which is attributed to him, recently wrote that he had criticized those who were using the leaders of the 2009 election protests to drive out their rivals – who could be candidates for the next Majlis – and called for the creation of an authority to set define the criteria for “seditionists,” a term used for the leaders of the 2009 protests. He warned those who had the privilege of possessing the authority to approve candidates to national elections against misusing the authority for personal vendettas.

It is doubtful that Motahari would remove himself from the race for the next Majlis, even though his rivals would welcome his own decision not to run as this would have the least costs for them.

This is the same approach that the opponents of reformers – hardliners and totalitarian forces – are advocating so that pro-reform candidates would voluntarily abandon their aspirations of getting into the next Majlis.

But such a decision translates into allowing tyrannical forces to clear the path for pseudo-reformers or ineffectual ones – to which even Ali Larijani, the current speaker of the Majlis is alleged to belong – to get into the people’s house.

Rooz online