Bharat Rakshak

Who Says Generals Aren't More Equal than Others?
By Karamatullah K Ghori
Published: 22nd March 2016 04:00 AM

Were George Orwell to come back to life, he would have no difficulty in proving as a cardinal truth his Animal Farm dictum that some were more equal than others. The puffed-up, pompous and pampered generals of Pakistan would be there to prove him right. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military dictator and strongman for nine years, had been in virtual house arrest for the past three years.

The elected government of Nawaz Sharif had launched criminal proceedings against him on charge of treason. A special tribunal of superior court judges had been trying him for abrogating Pakistan’s constitution for self-aggrandisement. He was also implicated in several other criminal acts, including the murder of a high-profile tribal leader of Baluchistan and cold-blooded murder of dozens of students of a girls’ seminary in Islamabad.

However, Musharraf walked out of his cage a free man on March 18 and immediately flew out to the safety of his plush abode in nearby Dubai. A day earlier, amid high drama full of jaw-dropping suspense befitting a Hollywood thriller, Pakistan’s apex court had dismissed the government’s appeal against an earlier judgment of the Sindh High Court granting Musharraf the freedom to leave Pakistan. His battery of expensive and smart lawyers had swayed the High Court to allow their client to defy his detention on medical grounds.

He was said to suffer from several ailments, including a spinal- cord problem, for the treatment of which Pakistan was said to be expertise-deficient; their client, his lawyers pleaded, couldn’t be cured in Pakistan. The media, obviously taking their cue from those stage-managing the former autocrat’s meticulously crafted and choreographed escape strategy from the reach of the law, joined in magnifying the “gravity” of Musharraf’s “declining health”.

Until minutes before Musharraf flew out of Karachi on a regular commercial flight of Emirates airlines, ticker-tape news on dozens of Pakistani television channels was claiming that because of his ‘critical condition’ Musharraf would be flown out on an air ambulance to Dubai. In all this high-wire drama, Nawaz Sharif and his cabinet colleagues cut the sorry figure of mute, if not dumb-founded, spectators. It wasn’t that they were totally clueless.

The Pakistan Supreme Court, in throwing out the government’s appeal against the order setting Musharraf free, had also thrown it a life-line if it would only take it. In fact, the apex court clearly suggested to, if not dared, Nawaz to show some backbone and put Musharraf’s name on the Exit-Control List (ECL). One of the judges on the apex bench shamed the government, saying, in so many words without mincing any, that while names of petty criminals figured on ECL the government was shy of not doing the same in case of a man accused of trampling the country’s Constitution under his boots.

But even such hefty amounts of spoon-feeding were inadequate to jog Nawaz into action and block the man who has been his nemesis for so long from going out of Pakistan scot-free, notwithstanding murder and even treason charges against him. The saga of Nawaz-Musharraf hostility and deep-seated animosity has almost been a folklore in Pakistan since 1999 when Musharraf, then army chief, had Nawaz turfed out of power in a blatantly contrived military coup. Musharraf had then charged him, spuriously, of ‘hijacking his return flight to Karachi from an official visit to Colombo.

But even a layman knew that Musharraf was being provocatively disingenuous. He’d been nursing a grudge against Nawaz for playing host, earlier in February of that year, to Prime Minister Vajpayee of India at that famously ingenious ‘bus diplomacy.’ Musharraf’s initial gambit, in his turf war against Nawaz, was the ill-fated military incursion into Kargil, executed behind Nawaz’s back. But when that ploy proved disastrous, the Quixotic Musharraf decided to go whole-hog in overthrowing an elected Prime Minister on fabricated charges. Nawaz was, then, forced into exile in Saudi Arabia and wasn’t allowed to return until just before the general elections of 2008.

There couldn’t be more solid grounds, all and sundry agreed, for Nawaz to haul up his unrepentant tormentor and nemesis in a court of law, which he did, three years ago, in what looked like an act of calculated bravado. Musharraf wasn’t just guilty of vendetta, out of sheer cussedness, against an elected PM that Nawaz was in 1999, but repeated the crime, in 2007, when he imposed an Emergency on the country, suspended its constitution and put the”uncooperative” judges of the apex court under house arrest only to perpetuate himself in power.

So why is it that with legal odds and assets overwhelmingly favouring him in pursuance of legal punishment for Musharraf’s palpable crimes against the State and Constitution of Pakistan, Nawaz has backed down from entering the home-stretch of his juridical fight against a culprit Musharraf? The answer, in simple and understandable terms, is that he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t fight the might of the firmly-heeled and well-entrenched military establishment — the so-called ‘deep state’ to its detractors — which had made it subtly clear to him that punishing one of its Chiefs, even if he was guilty of violating the highest law of the land, will not be tolerated.

The bottom line from Pakistan’s principal brokers and wielders of raw power was that there was no way Nawaz should entertain the fancy idea of calling Musharraf’s bluff and hold him accountable for his myriad acts of dishonouring the pristine laws of Pakistan. Political pundits and seers with precise knowledge of the permutation and dispensation of power in Pakistan have never had any fancy notion of Nawaz getting away with his gamble of punishing Musharraf for his crimes.

They knew, from day one of Nawaz’s bravado, that notwithstanding the fact that he had defied those writing him off as a political force and staging a remarkable come-back after years of exile, there was no way he could skirt around the ramparts Pakistan’s all-powerful Khakis have built around their bastion of power to protect their interests against incursions from any quarters.

Having been bitten twice before by a collegial military high command highly conscious of its privileged — though clearly self-arrogated — status of final arbiters of power in Pakistan, it couldn’t be but naïve of Nawaz to think he could tilt the windmills in his favour, this time around. Most observers, being charitable and inclined to give Nawaz the benefit of doubt, agreed that in the guise of charging Musharraf for high treason, Nawaz was only testing the waters to know if the current was turning in favour of democracy and recognition of rule of law, after all.

But Nawaz’s litmus test has lost its colour and faded into oblivion. The generals, as usual, have strong armed the civilian government and prevailed on it to desist from making life difficult for one of “them”. How prophetic was that sage who said, ‘all countries have an army, but in Pakistan the army has a country.’
The author is a former Pakistani diplomat. Email: K_K_ghori@yahoo.com

Falijee wrote:Fans in Pak break TV sets, LCDs, say ‘we know Pakistan can never beat India’

Sorry for the repeat posting of this news at regular intervals

syed kamran1 day ago
Pakistan funda..
1. To play matches... they come to India..
2. To sell books.. they come to India...
3. To sing gazhals...they come to India...
4. For medical treatment.. they come to India..
5. To become a famous actor.. they come toh India..

Then why the hell did we give you a separate nation?? Just to make bombs?

And height of irony is.. even to blast those bombs... they come to India.. 

Falijee wrote:Jahil Hamid Resurfaces In Support Of His Fast Friend !

jash_p wrote:I have been watching one of the Paki talk show by accident where Panama pappers were discused and one PML-N ex general guy was telling that he have 400 % proof that it is Yanki-Yehud conspiracy because one of the owner of firm is Jew and working for CIA and they leaked it now can you believe his reason-----

to disrupt CEPC as Pakis and china are building CEPC which is so great things for Muslim umha and China that they will become economic world power and west Europe, USA, Israel etc. will loose economic power and they will become third world countries, India have to give up KASHMIR and after that inshalla every one will be forced to recite AOA.