NOT LONG ago, Pakistani president general Pervez Musharraf was waltzing across the United States on Pakistani taxpayer money, appearing on comedy programs like The Daily Show and plugging his mediocre memoir, In the Line of Fire. Less than a year later, his fortunes appear to have taken a nosedive, as he has succeeded in alienating virtually every segment of Pakistani society. It now seems simply a matter of time before his regime collapses. It’s not clear how he will leave office, but his base of support has now eroded so far that he may be forced to allow general elections later this year where he could simply be voted out.
The judicial crisis
The great unraveling began earlier this year when Musharraf suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on March 9, sparking a rebellion among the nation’s lawyers and officers of the judiciary. Not that the Supreme Court and the Pakistani judiciary have been consistent opponents of military rule. On the contrary, “the higher judiciary in Pakistan has often abdicated its constitutional duty to uphold the law by legitimating military rule,” as the International Crisis Group (ICG) noted in a July report. Thus, when Musharraf seized power in 1999, and the then-chief justice and five other members of the Supreme Court resigned, they were easily replaced by others who, writes the ICG, “swore allegiance to the military government in January 2000.” Chaudhry himself was appointed to this court by Musharraf in 2005.
But Chaudhry’s rulings had lately begun to antagonize the general’s administration. In 2006, he overturned the government’s attempt to privatize state-owned steel mills. Then, earlier this year, he began to inquire into hundreds of cases of people who had gone missing. These “disappeared” included not just people suspected of links to terrorist groups, but opposition activists as well.
More importantly, however, the chief justice seemed unlikely to back Musharraf’s bid to retain his dual role as head of state and chief of the military. With elections due to be held later this year, and with opposition parties losing patience with his regime, Musharraf moved against Chaudhry, and unwittingly triggered a mass movement against his own government.
The protest movement was led by lawyers and bar associations. Seven justices resigned, including a High Court judge in the city of Lahore. Chaudhry himself became something of a cause célèbre, drawing large crowds and media attention wherever he went.
On May 12, Musharraf supporters instigated and carried out a series of violent attacks on opposition activists ahead of a Karachi rally at which Chaudhry was scheduled to speak. Some forty people were murdered while police stood by, in what was described as the worst political violence in that city in decades. The government then decided to stifle media coverage of Chaudhry’s public appearances, taking three TV stations off the air. More than 200 journalists were charged with violation of an emergency ordinance curtailing media freedoms. But the pro-Chaudhry rallies continued to attract tens of thousands of demonstrators across the country, as dissatisfaction with eight years of military rule coalesced behind the demand to reinstate the ousted chief justice.
The Lal Masjid crisis
Next came the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque). Many observers believe that the government instigated the new crisis to distract public attention at home and to shore up Musharraf’s flagging support abroad. The military’s crackdown on radical Islamist students operating out of the Islamabad mosque culminated in an eight-day siege and the killing of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of students. Musharraf has since been fulminating against “Islamic extremism,” proclaiming it to be the single most important threat to Pakistan’s “security,” and vowing repeatedly to wipe it out.
But the timing of the military’s actions renders their motives suspect. After all, the Lal Masjid radicals, led by pro-Taliban clerics Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, had been operating openly with impunity since at least January of this year. Stick-wielding women students from the Jamia Hafsa madrassa associated with Lal Masjid had been carrying out an aggressive campaign for the establishment of sharia law for months. They kidnapped women whom they accused of prostitution and ransacked video stores for distributing “immoral” videos. But these and other acts of aggressive vigilantism had gone unchecked.
Indeed, Ghazi and Aziz were known to have had friends in high places. When they were arrested in 2004, none other than Ijaz ul Haq, the current minister for religious affairs, had interceded on their behalf. Musharraf himself has relied on the right-wing six-party Islamist alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) to stay in power, rigging elections in their favor in 2002 in return for their support of his unconstitutional presidency.
As expected, the Islamist backlash in the wake of the Lal Masjid crisis has been bloody. Immediately after the siege of the mosque ended, the Taliban-dominated Waziristan province tore up the peace agreement with the Pakistani government that had been in place since September last year. Back then, the Pakistani military was forced to withdraw and hand over administration to local tribal leaders with ties to the Taliban. This truce now lay in tatters, and attacks on government forces escalated dramatically, as one suicide bombing after another rocked the area. In the span of ten days following the end of the siege in Islamabad, more than 200 people were killed in renewed fighting in Waziristan.
Much as Musharraf would like to point to these events as evidence of the impending Islamist threat to Pakistan’s “national security,” the Islamists in fact have little popular support among ordinary Pakistanis. Contrary to its portrayal by the Western media, Pakistani society remains overwhelmingly secular and democratic in its outlook. This is not surprising when we consider that even in the rigged 2002 elections, the Islamists only managed to win 11 percent of the votes.
Thus, in the wake of the Lal Masjid siege, thousands took to the streets to denounce both Musharraf’s dictatorship and religious extremism, with chants of “mullahism murdabad” (“death to mullahism”). According to the Daily Times, Asma Jehangir, chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said in a speech at a rally in Lahore: “We, the people of Pakistan, are not oblivious to this mullah-military alliance…. There can be no democracy in Pakistan unless [military]-backed mullahs stop issuing decrees to exploit people in the name of Islam.”
The final curtain?
Musharraf’s problems didn’t end there. The dust had barely settled on the Lal Masjid complex when the Supreme Court declared that Iftikhar Chaudhry’s dismissal was unconstitutional, and reinstated him as chief justice, further undermining Musharraf’s authority.
The curtains seem to be closing on Musharraf’s eight-year dictatorship even as he is preparing to have himself re-elected later this year by his puppet parliament. It seems increasingly likely that Musharraf will have no choice but to hold the general elections later this year, as mandated by the Constitution.
The crisis of his regime has given a new lease on life to the leaders of the civilian political establishment—leaders who just eight years ago had been discredited for their history of corruption, nepotism, and embezzlement. Chief among these are Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). Another mainstream party, Tehrik-i-Insaf (TI), led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, has also boosted its credibility by its consistent opposition to the dictatorship.
The PPP is regarded as the more liberal and consistently secular of the three major parties. Bhutto might well have endangered its electoral prospects, however, by agreeing to secret meetings with Musharraf that have led to speculation about a U.S.-backed power-sharing deal between the two. She also went out of her way to express her support for the crackdown on Lal Masjid, something that the more conservative and religious-minded PML-N and TI refused to do. Nevertheless, Bhutto has repeatedly rejected any deal that would involve Musharraf staying on as president and chief of army staff, asserting that his “uniform is not negotiable.”
Free and fair elections would in all likelihood result in a victory for secular, democratic parties at the national and regional levels, according to observers. A desperate Musharraf might therefore declare an emergency and cancel the elections. Or the military might try to once again rig the elections in favor of Musharraf’s sham party, the PML-Q. However, this will only add fuel to the growing civil unrest in the country.
One way or another, it appears that the dictator will be shown the door by Pakistanis in the coming months. This rapidly developing political context also provides new opportunities for the Pakistani Left. Groups like the Labor Party of Pakistan have successfully related to the mass movements that have emerged this year. The growing pro-democracy movements will likely give them a larger audience for their vision of a genuine alternative to the military, the mullahs, and the politicians.
Nagesh Rao teaches postcolonial literature at The College of New Jersey.
