– Two brands of tea, two worldviews in governance
Comparing the two brands “Chai Jahan” and “Chai Debash” can have many benefits for all of us Iranians.
Chai Jahan was one of the most famous tea brands in the era before the revolution. The owner and manager of Chai Jahan was a genius entrepreneur named “Mohammed Sadeq Fateh Yazdi” who over time established a series of factories and manufacturing companies, from tea and blankets to edible oil to motor oil around Karaj. That too without getting a dollar of preferred currency or support and rent. He was a classic investor who was able to contribute to the prosperity and economic prosperity of his country simply by using his creativity and the structure that allowed him to produce and do business; A capitalist who also had an unlimited interest in charity and public benefit works, but at that time he was sick and had a fever.
The communist guerillas of Fadai Khalq had come to the conclusion that Fatih Yazdi is a bourgeois comprador who has spilled the blood of workers and there is no more necessary task than his revolutionary assassination. “Gholamohsin Saedi”, a famous storyteller and playwright, reveals a year or two after the revolution: “I knew Fath Ali Panahian closely, he was a young man in his twenties. He was a strange child. He was the one who killed the big-headed capitalist Karaji (Fatih Yazdi), the one who had the world’s tea.”
Fatih Yazdi was killed by three bullets in August 1353 under the Taj Bridge and the People’s Fedayee Guerrilla Organization officially accepted the responsibility for this murder. Fateh Yazdi’s companies were also confiscated after the revolution.
Debash tea is a post-revolutionary brand that, unlike Jahan tea, which used only the products of Iran’s tea gardens, is solely dependent on importing tea from abroad. The CEO of this company, Mr. Akbar Rahimi, was born in 1350 and has been working since he was 35 years old. According to the General Inspection Organization of the country, 79% of the preferred currency for importing tea has been allocated to Debash Tea Company (an amount of about three billion dollars, equal to a quarter of the country’s annual oil income). This action has been carried out with the coordination and approval of the Ministry of Security, the Ministry of Agricultural Jihad and the Central Bank since 2018 and for three years.
Debash Company was supposed to use this three billion dollars of foreign exchange at a preferential rate to import machinery and tea from India, but it spent a significant part of this amount elsewhere and instead of importing high-quality tea from India, it imported low-quality tea from Kenya.
Yes, world tea was a symbol of a western capitalist regime. Debash tea is a symbol of an independent and self-sufficient revolutionary regime that has cut ties to global imperialism.
Bijan Ashtari,
Author and translator
ـــــ
This post is written by amirBRZa