Daily Times

Time has really flown. I cannot believe it has been 15 years already. I was calling on a customer, who was incidentally a Pakistani lady, on an October afternoon. She asked me in her accented Urdu with a Punjabi tone if I knew what had happened back home. I said to her, “No sister, I have no idea.” She hurriedly said, “Thank God there is martial law again in Pakistan.” I hung up on her and surfed the most popular websites and, to my dismay, all of those websites said the same exact thing. A name and a face had been introduced to the world of a man who called himself the chief executive. That man, the commando, the warrior, was former General Pervez Musharraf.

Many questions raced through my mind and the story became very questionable and bizarre. I spoke with my family members back in Karachi and there was a general perception that the people were sort of relieved with this change because the tensions between the elected prime minister and the army chief were at an all-time high. Pakistan, a country in perpetual crisis since its inception, was incapable of handling the showdown between the two gladiators.

Without repeating what has been stated here in the past, what struck me as very odd as soon as I read the details on the very first news website was how Musharraf was able to manage the entire coup from midair. Musharraf’s version has throughout made it an impromptu, reactive event but it defied any reasonable intellect. The subsequent revelations confirmed what I had suspected on it being a highly planned event.

The spins of the event were sold to pacify the general public on how it was necessary to save the country and that the only sound and stable institution in the country, the Pakistan army, was being targeted. All the archives are widely available for any investigative journalist to uncover and unravel, if any such resentment was present at that time. Next, in the history of hijacks, this was a unique hijacking, where the hijacker had no demands and, for that matter, the hijacker was not even on board. Yet an elected prime minister was dragged, arrested and then sent to prison for that reason.

Now, to the elected prime minister. The folks that I spoke to back home and here in the US had a mixed reaction. I hate to say this but a lot of people felt that politicians were a curse, only the military was capable of running our country, and so on and so forth. Some people that I spoke to, particularly here in the US, agreed that a coup was wrong but had sympathy for Musharraf because of the foolish decision of the prime minister not to let Musharraf land in Pakistan. I would agree with these folks partially, as in my dictionary there is no four-letter word called “coup”. However, among the many blunders that Mr Sharif did commit in his political life, one of them was to not let a passenger plane carrying Pakistani citizens land in their own country. My friends, who are US citizens, would never support any such move in the US, no matter how stupid the president of the US may be; why such double standards, I wanted to know. The response was mostly that one cannot compare the US and Pakistan and that the prime minister’s rotten attitude, according to their assessment, was a contributing factor.

It was quite an enlightening experience for me to absorb the exception and its interesting rationale. One may ask why I would want to revisit such an old and oft repeated chapter in our history. The reason is plain and simple: reflection. What has changed in the last 15 years? If you were to ask me, I would say that, in reality, not much. With some minor changes here and there, the two characters are perhaps entangled in a relatively similar conflict. Musharraf is down but not out; he may be an ex-general but not completely toothless. The institution that Musharraf once represented is still in play and has an extremely significant say.

The elected government is weak, fragile and under immense pressure. On the surface, the show has been very superficial of both parties being on the same page. However, with utter respect, who holds the book? A full 15 years later, we have a litany of television channels, openly naming the establishment and, yes, very openly advocating everything that resembles a coup but being worded differently. Much like what Musharraf termed himself instead of being called a chief martial law administrator, when he took the reins of this otherwise demoralised nation.

The dear darling government is playing the victim of this latest attempt to derail the democratic process. I am not sure if I will be around 15 years from now but chances are that 15 years from now the underlying question will still be the same. Who holds the book and what page is everyone on?

The writer is a Pakistani-American
mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar