In 1999, when General Musharraf ousted the then Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, from office, many Pakistanis welcomed the coup. People distributed sweets on the streets, celebrating that their Army chief would repair the economy, nearing collapse after the 1998 nuclear tests. Many also appeared to buy Musharraf’s story that Sharif had aborted an otherwise brilliant Kargil plan by succumbing to US pressure and getting the Army to withdraw.
Nine years later, when Musharraf stepped down as President of Pakistan rather than face a joint impeachment motion by the Asif Ali Zardari-led Pakistan People’s Party government and the Opposition Pakistan Muslim League (N) of Sharif, people of Pakistan celebrated again. No tears were shed over his departure.
Instead, there were calls to hold him to account for a long list of alleged crimes: treason for carrying out the coup and subverting the constitution; conspiracy, or at least complicity, in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto; killing Ali Akbar Khan Bugti, the powerful tribal sardar who was leading an insurgency in the Balochistan province; for the killings of 24 people in Karachi when security forces opened fire against supporters of Ifthikar Chaudhary, who had been sacked as Chief Justice of Pakistan; for the disappearance of hundreds of people, allegedly sold by the Pakistan Army to the US as terror suspects during the war on terror. Eventually, he would be convicted and sentenced to death by hanging for subverting the constitution, and lived in self-exile in Dubai thereafter. He was declared a fugitive in the Benazir Bhutto case.
Sometimes it only takes a spark to turn the public mood. In Musharraf’s case, it was the sacking of the Chief Justice of Pakistan in March 2007. The country’s most powerful man, who was both the Army chief and President, had hardly anticipated that Chaudhary would turn his dismissal into a powerful protest movement, with lawyers in the lead, and the participation of civil society of various hues, harnessing a variety of causes.
Resentment against Musharraf had been growing among conservative sections of Pakistanis, and two religious parties allied to the military ruler, against Pakistan’s ready participation in the Global War on Terror, even though Musharraf was playing double games with the Americans. Pakistanis were shocked too at the killing by the military of the 80-year-old Bugti, who Musharraf had pledged to “fix” as the insurgency in Balochistan appeared to grow – Baloch militants had fired rockets at a military camp when Musharraf was visiting the area.
And then there was Musharraf’s apparent move for reconciliation with India on Kashmir. In a historic joint statement in January 2004 between him and then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, signed on the sidelines of the Islamabad SAARC summit, Musharraf agreed he would not permit terror attacks on India from Pakistan or Pakistan administered territory, a reference to PoK. This was preceded by a ceasefire in October 2003. The two countries had begun a structured dialogue called the Composite Dialogue Process, discussing eight subjects including Kashmir and terrorism, Siachen and Sir Creek, trade and commerce, and people-to-people contacts. In 2005, a cross-LoC bus service inaugurated travel between the two sides of Kashmir. The two countries loosened the visa regimes, and India-Pakistan cricket and cultural exchanges increased the bonhomie. Musharraf, whose family had moved to Pakistan from Delhi, looked up his old family home during a visit to the Indian capital for a cricket match.
Though Musharraf had allowed Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to flourish under other names after proscribing them, it was still a far cry from Kargil, the victorious return of Masood Azhar after being freed from an Indian jail in return for the release of IC 814 that had been hijacked to Kandahar in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the subsequent formation of the JeM under Masood Azhar’s leadership, and the December 2001 attack on Parliament that brought the two sides to the brink of war.
When Musharraf announced in 2006 that he and the Manmohan Singh government were close to finalising a four-point formula for the resolution of the Kashmir issue, there was shock in Pakistan (Musharraf also insulted an ISI favourite, Syed Ali Shah Geelani), but no open opposition. Then Foreign Minister Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri has written that the discussions on the proposed solution were taken by a core leadership group on the Pakistani side that also included the ISI chief. But the alleged “sell-out of Kashmir” began to be talked about more openly in 2007, as the lawyers’ Black Coat movement for the restoration of the Chief Justice grew into a demand for the restoration of democracy, and groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami brought their own causes into it.
The summer of 2007 brought more misery for Musharraf. Pakistan’s iron brother China was unhappy that some Chinese nationals running massage parlours in Islamabad were abducted by students from Jamia Hafsa, an Islamist women’s seminary, and handed over to clerics at Lal Masjid, where mainly Pashtun and some Uighur militants from the FATA regions had holed up, and were well stocked with arms and ammunition. A commando operation followed, and more than 100 people died. That was the end of Pakistan’s jaded romance with Musharraf.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the same group that carried out the Peshawar bombing on January 30, came into existence and unleashed wave after wave of terror attacks on the country in revenge for Lal Masjid.
India-Pakistan talks – “paused” in July 2006 following the Mumbai train blasts that were traced to the LeT, restarted at the Havana NAM summit, and sputtered again in February 2007 after the Samjhauta Express blast, in which over 60 people, mostly Pakistanis, were killed – were abandoned as both sides realised that Musharraf had run out of political capital.
Around the same time, the US and the British, who believed only Musharraf at the helm could guarantee the country’s continued cooperation in the GWOT, were busy brokering an arrangement that would make him more acceptable to his own country – there would be elections and he as President and Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister would run Pakistan jointly, giving it a democratic veneer. Nawaz Sharif, exiled for life and shuttling between his refuge in Saudi Arabia and family businesses in UAE and London, cried foul. By then, the Supreme Court, ranged fully against Musharraf, granted him a pardon and ruled he could return to politics in Pakistan. The Saudis too intervened on his behalf.
Musharraf tried to make a comeback through the only route he knew – another coup, this time against the judiciary. Sensing a weakening Musharraf, Benazir upped the terms of the bargain with Musharraf, and agreed to enable his re-election as President on the condition that he would step down as Army chief and grant her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari a clean chit from the corruption cases against them. An increasingly beleaguered Musharraf called off his second coup, agreed to all the conditions, and handed over the Army to then ISI chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
Musharraf was out of uniform but as President he still held all the powers, having rewritten the Constitution back in the day to make his presidency all-powerful after a rigged election in early 2002 that he won. He and Benazir were increasingly at odds, and when she was killed on December 27, 2007, in a gun and suicide bomb attack claimed by the TTP during the campaign for the January 8, 2008, parliamentary election, he was accused of not providing her enough security and worse, for being part of a conspiracy to have her killed.
The elections were postponed. The PPP and PML(N) formed the government together, and joined hands to impeach Musharraf. Though it was not clear if they had the required two-thirds in the National Assembly, Musharraf decided to step down rather than go through with the ignominy of the impeachment process. The government let him leave the country, likely under an arrangement with the Army.
But Musharraf believed he still had a chance to run Pakistan, and goaded by the few supporters he still had, formed a political party and returned in 2013 to contest that year’s election. He and his party were disqualified from running, and after the courts put out warrants for his arrest in the Benazir and Bugti cases, he retreated to Dubai again.
Musharraf, who had grown up partly in Turkey, imagined he was Pakistan’s Kemal Attaturk, and would like his hero, modernise Pakistan along the lines of “enlightened moderation”, a term of his coinage for moderate Islam. But he could hardly convince his political allies to reform laws such as the anti-women Hudood laws, let alone the draconian blasphemy laws. His main achievement remains the free hand he gave to the media, which proliferated during his term.
India rues the missed opportunity for resolving Kashmir, but it now seems that even if there had been an agreement, it would not have outlasted Musharraf. Net-net, Musharraf was just another military ruler of Pakistan in the long tradition of that country, full of bombast and confidence but falling finally to his own overreach.
nirupama.subramanian@expressindia.com
