When Tyranny Finds Apologists Abroad

People’s Democratic Party (PDP) president and Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti visited the Islamic Republic occupying Iran’s Cultural Centre and embassy in New Delhi on Monday, March 9, 2026, to offer her “condolences” following the killing of Iran regime’s Supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei in strikes by the US and Israel.

The statement by Mehbooba Mufti praising or mourning a dictator like Ali Khamenei is not simply misguided. It is a disgraceful display of moral blindness.

For decades, the Islamic Republic occupying Iran has presided over a machinery of repression built on executions, fear, and the systematic crushing of human dignity. Under his rule, prisons have filled with dissidents, young protesters have been gunned down in the streets, women have been beaten for refusing submission, and countless families have buried loved ones whose only “crime” was demanding freedom.

Calling praise for such a tyrant “solidarity with the Iranian people” is an insult to the Iranian people themselves—who have spent decades fighting the tyranny he embodies.

The Iranian nation has spent more than four decades resisting the very tyranny Mufti now romanticizes. Generation after generation of Iranians have risen up, risking imprisonment, torture, and death for the simple right to live in a free country.

What Mufti and others like her refuse to understand—or choose to ignore—is a simple truth: the real victims are the Iranian people themselves. Their country was stolen in the 1979 Islamic coup and turned into a prison ruled by clerical tyranny. Since that day, an ancient civilization has been held hostage by a brutal ideological machine that fears nothing more than the voice of its own citizens.

When politicians abroad praise the architects of that oppression, they do more than reveal their own moral confusion. They help whitewash crimes against humanity. They lend legitimacy to those who silence journalists, execute political prisoners, and terrorize an entire population into obedience.

The women of Iran who tear off the symbols of forced submission, the students who chant for freedom despite the threat of bullets, the workers and intellectuals who dare to dream of a different future—these are the people who deserve solidarity. Not the rulers who imprison them.

It is especially shameful that a leader of the People’s Democratic Party would portray geopolitical conflicts as a “war against evil” while standing beside one of the most oppressive forces of the modern age. Words like justice and resistance mean nothing when they are used to defend tyranny.

History has a long memory. It remembers those who stood with the oppressed—and those who sided with their oppressors. It remembers who defended freedom and who chose to excuse brutality.

Mehbooba Mufti has made her choice.

But the Iranian people have made theirs. They continue to rise, again and again, against the tyranny that has occupied their homeland since 1979. Their courage is undeniable, their struggle is just, and their demand is clear: freedom.

No amount of propaganda from foreign politicians will erase that truth.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)