After spending years in self-imposed exile, former Pakistan president and army chief Pervez Musharraf died in Dubai on February 5. Here’s a look at his chequered legacy.
By Marvi Sitmed
The writer is a Pakistani journalist, human rights defender and a professor at the University of Connecticut
Former Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, a four-star general who seized power in a 1999 coup, died at a hospital in Dubai on February 5 after a prolonged illness. He was 79. His name will forever be associated with instigating riots in Karachi, state-sponsored violence in Balochistan, the coldblooded assassination of Baloch leader Akbar Bugti and the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, an embarrassing military misadventure in Kargil, and, well, a ‘historic’ Kashmir formula that purportedly became the reason for his downfall.
Till his last breath, Musharraf remained at large, escaping punishment for his crimes against the constitution and the people of Pakistan. His former institution, the armed forces, remained steadfast in defending and protecting him despite his excesses and violation of the constitution.
A commando from the Pakistan Army’s prestigious Special Service Group (SSG), he had bragged during his heydays in the presidency that he wasn’t afraid of anything and anyone. But chose to escape from an ongoing trial in the Supreme Court, eventually leaving the country only to never return after going into coma, owing to massive organ failure.
This despite the fact that former army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa got the ball rolling to pave the way for his return to die in his homeland — a country he had ruled with an iron fist for more than nine years and whose constitution he had trampled.
What we will never know
He was a man of striking contradictions and contrasts. In 1999, he initiated the Kargil conflict by infiltrating regular and irregular troops into the Kargil sector of Kashmir along the Line of Control. After India’s retaliation, the army allegedly left its injured to die on the Indian side without claiming the dead. It was a grave embarrassment inflicted on Pakistan by the military under Musharraf’s command, without even consulting the prime minister or president of the country, who was supposed to be the supreme commander of the armed forces.
Two years later, in July 2001, he was enjoying a photo-op in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra, on the sidelines of the Agra summit hosted by then PM, late Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which was aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the longstanding Kashmir conflict between the two countries. Musharraf’s famous four-point plan was hailed as a groundbreaking historical development that brought the solution to Kashmir into the grasp of both the countries. This comes up in the then Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book, Neither a Hawk nor a Dove .
The agreement, however, slipped away hours before signing. Both sides have their theories about what happened. In 2004, while speaking at an event, Musharraf said the Indian cabinet had refused to approve the signing. Now that both men leading the two sides, Vajpayee and Musharraf, are dead, it is safe to say we might never know what exactly transpired during those decisive hours.
The summit failed to achieve lasting peace, but Musharraf won himself a ‘man of peace’ reputation despite faltering on that count many times afterwards. In 2021, Pakistan-based religious extremist terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad claimed responsibility for the attack on the assembly complex in Kashmir.
In an interview with a Pakistani TV channel in 2019, Musharraf said Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies were engaged in terrorist activities against each other, and the security agencies under his command used Jaish for this purpose. But, he said that he firmly believed that Jaish was a terrorist organisation that had even staged an attack on him.
In January 2002 again, Pakistani newspapers reported with jubilation how Musharraf had astonished everyone at the 11th Saarc Summit in Kathmandu with a speech replete with “humility, eloquence and firm resolve to seek peace”.
Not just that, Musharraf surprised everyone, including the closest of his aides, when he got down from the podium and moved towards PM Vajpayee to shake hands. Vajpayee got up from his seat and extended his hand. Deafening applause followed. There it was sealed: Musharraf, the man of the Kargil war, was now the ‘man for peace’.
Man with many faces
Years later, he was hosted as a keynote speaker at a prominent media organisation’s conclave in New Delhi and was found pontificating on “giving peace a chance”. This was when he was ousted as president after massive protests across the country against his dictatorship.
In India, though, the ‘man for peace’ got a standing ovation after his speech. In Islamabad that evening, I remember conversing with an Indian journalist friend who kept trying to make sense of why a supporter of Hafiz Saeed got such warmth in New Delhi.
This was certainly not the only contradiction Musharraf had. On the domestic front, he had framed himself as an ‘enlightened moderate’ with a progressive outlook, rejecting overt religiosity. At the same time, he allowed, rather provided proactive patronage to the religious seminaries in parts of the country where there was no prior track record of such religious culture.
The most secular cultures in Pakistan, i.e. Balochistan and Sindh, and to some extent Islamabad too, succumbed to an unprecedented hike in the number of seminaries. New mosques erupted every few kilometres in these areas.
The religious political parties, ostensibly on the Opposition benches in Parliament, worked hand-in-glove with Musharraf. In the tribal belt adjoining Afghanistan, these religious parties provided a fertile ground for the Taliban and other assorted Islamist groups to flourish. At the same time, Musharraf kept getting billions of dollars for the army under the Coalition Support Fund from the US to fight the ‘war on terror’.
He was supposed to be a liberal and progressive man who believed in gender equality, because he “gave” 17% seats in Parliament and the provincial assemblies as a gender quota for women, and brought around 40,000 women into the local bodies as elected representatives.
Both were unprecedented steps, but it was not what women deserved. Years before he usurped power in 1999, the women’s movement in Pakistan had been demanding a 33% gender quota at all levels. Musharraf halved it and was yet called a pro-gender equality progressive.
Musharraf’s legacy would always include insulting Mukhtaran Mai, the woman who was gang-raped, as someone who was making noise because she wanted to get asylum in a western country like Canada. His legacy would also include Shazia Khalid, the Baloch woman who was raped by an army captain who went scot-free after Musharraf pressured Khalid to retract her complaint and leave the country.
He would be remembered for mistreating respected veteran journalist, late M Ziauddin, who asked uncomfortable questions during a presser in London. He would be remembered for military operations in Balochistan, enforced disappearances of Baloch, Pakhtun and Sindhi activists. It would be difficult to forget his clamping down on the media, yet bagging the accolades for ‘freeing the media’ by giving out a multitude of licences to private TV channel.
He was fond of calling himself brave and strong. Yet, instead of facing the consequences of his actions and a trial in the Supreme Court, he chose to spend the last few years of his life in self-imposed exile, fearing the possibility of incarceration.
He made his escape when he was on his way to the Supreme Court for a hearing, but his car suddenly took a curious turn towards Rawalpindi — the city that hosts the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army, and the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology. Musharraf headed to the latter.
Within hours, he was aboard a plane that took him to Dubai and then London for his cardiac treatment. In the last few months as he became gravely ill, Pakistanis began having heated debates about whether or not the dictator be allowed in the country, forgiven or punished even after his death. His former institution, however, was worried about how to make a state funeral possible. His crimes against Pakistan are the least of the worries of the brass, it seems.