By Karamatullah K Ghori
Published: 10th April 2014
As India enters the home stretch of a crucial electoral battle in its decades-old seasoned democracy, next-door Pakistan’s civilian government seems well poised on the threshold of its still-wobbly democracy to challenge the decades-old military supremacy in the country.
Ironically, the turf to Nawaz Sharif’s civilian government to challenge, if not yet assault, the ramparts of military power in Pakistan has been furnished by the shenanigans and antics of its last Bonaparte, General Pervez Musharraf.
Musharraf’s indictment, finally, on March 31 by the special court trying him for treason under Article 6 of the Constitution—for having trampled and subverted it not once but twice—is arguably a huge leap forward by the civilian government to assert its democratic power, something taken for granted in any normal democratic set-up. But Pakistan all through its years and decades has been anything but a normal country.
Why Musharraf’s indictment is being interpreted by pundits and pollsters alike as a game-changer is because of the uniquely privileged status that generals in Pakistan have had up until this watershed. Generals—soldiers-of-fortune sans sophistry—seized political power with impunity and literally got away with the murder of democracy. A Pakistani Bonaparte could rest assured that he’d readily get from an obliging and accommodating judiciary a cachet of legality without much ado. The erstwhile judicial mandarins and satraps had coined this one-size-fits-all formulation that went by the sobriquet of “law of necessity”.
Military takeovers were condoned with munificence as a necessary evil to save the nation and its much-flaunted “ideology”. The generals had assumed the mantle of saviours of its frontiers and guardians of its ideological bequest.
Holed up in the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology (AFIC) since the start of the year, Musharraf not only cleverly avoided his physical presence in court—a necessity for his indictment—but also tugged at all the known strings in the military establishment to get away, by hook or by crook, from the reach of law of Pakistan. He and his lawyers, while pronouncing their lack of faith in the constitutionality of the special court, constantly harped on the need for him to get “expert” medical treatment abroad. Little did they ponder that in doing so they were, mindlessly, heaping scorn on AFIC’s claim of being the ace medical outfit in Pakistan to treat heart ailments.
What Musharraf in his hubris couldn’t contemplate was that Pakistan had moved many a miles in the years since he subverted an elected government—headed by Nawaz Sharif—in 1999 on spurious grounds and donned the mantle of power for himself. The sea change in Pakistan’s power configuration is owed to two game-changers, both, ironically, off Musharraf’s own bat.
The dictator relaxed the official stranglehold over the means of information that opened the floodgates for media blitz. He thought this would unleash a wave of mass popularity for him; it became a tool to unravel his autocracy and trigger a massive backlash against his grip on power. His second faux-pas, which turned into his Waterloo, was taking on a judiciary that hadn’t been a handicap to him but he provoked it and stirred up a hornet’s nest. His sacking and brutal humiliation of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and his colleagues of the Supreme Court was the last straw that broke the people’s patience with his one-man rule. What followed was, in the eyes of his detractors, a well-deserved comeuppance; to his followers, he dug his own grave.
The same judiciary, backed to the hilt by a Nawaz government with plenty of old scores to settle, is turning the screws on the beleaguered ex-army chief who thought he was above the law, as others in his league did before him.
Why Musharraf didn’t succeed in his ploy to defy the court has a logical explanation: he and the GHQ command are not on the same page. The AFIC doctors may have been dancing to his tune; they kept feeding tailor-made medical certificates in his favour. Some rogue elements of the infamous ISI, notorious for its appetite for power, were also in cahoots with him, never lagging in made-to-order “security threats” to him, whenever a court appearance date was in sight.
However, it seems that Nawaz Sharif’s trust in choosing a fellow Lahori and namesake to head the army has paid dividends. The new Chief, General Raheel Sharif, is said to be toeing the line of non-interference in the political process fostered by his predecessor, General Kayani.
Pundits also believe there’s a mushrooming sense in the top brass that Musharraf has caused embarrassment aplenty to the military establishment and become a liability. How could they shelter a Bonaparte who has broken tradition and formed his own political party? It’s another matter that Musharraf’s putative party, The All Pakistan Muslim League, never took off and remains a drawing-room chatting group at best.
Run out of options, Musharraf did, eventually, appear before it on March 31 and was promptly indicted with treason charge, which carries a maximum of death penalty.
But Musharraf and his lawyers, some of the most ill-reputed, felt they still had an ace up their sleeve: humanitarian card. Musharraf’s mother, 95, has been ailing in Dubai for long and he’d like to be by her “deathbed”. The plea does touch a sensitive chord. But Musharraf should be well served to recall that when the boot was on the other leg and Nawaz’ father had died in Lahore while he was still in exile in Saudi Arabia, Musharraf had arrogantly disallowed him from attending his father’s funeral. Nawaz has rejected Musharraf’s plea to let him fly out of the slammer to Dubai. Of course he couldn’t have taken such a game-changing decision all by himself; the mechanics of power play in Pakistan aren’t that firmly rooted in principles, yet.
A day before Nawaz said no to the “humanitarian plea”, he had a much-publicised confab with General Sharif. The logical sense filtering from that was that the brass didn’t wish to cross swords with Nawaz on an issue of such sensitivity.
Musharraf’s trial, having crossed the Rubicon, may not be lengthy. There’s a mountain of well-documented evidence to implicate him. Few are discounting a guilty verdict but fewer still would wager on the maximum death penalty. But it doesn’t matter if Musharraf is hanged or not. What transfixes pundits and laymen alike is the logjam is broken and for the first time in its chequered history the law is catching up with soldiers of fortune. It’s no mean achievement for a country often laid low by military adventurers.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
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