Fareeha Choudhry June 21, 2006

Tags: Musharraf , Constitution , Democracy

href="/tag/law">law minister, a certain Mr Wasi Zafar (also known more popularly as Slapper-in-Chief due his and his progeny’s rather unfortunate tendency to start slapping public servants and members of the media at will) stating that Mr President General Pervez Musharraf can retain both his offices, that of president and incumbent army chief, at a time and that he would re-elected as a President in uniform for the next five years.

He also goes onto state how though Article 43 of the Constitution bans the President from holding both offices at a time, Article 41-7B of the Constitution renders Article 43 ineffective thus implying that the President can hold both offices at a time. He then goes on to state that he didn’t really understand the Constitution and that he was just repeating everything he has been asked to repeat and that he was truly sorry for slapping people in public and that he would make sure his son kept his hands safely in his pockets when in public places and that he was hoping that Pervez Musharraf would live forever and be president and army chief forever so that he himself could then stay on as law minister forever and so that his son could go on slapping whoever he wanted though he himself promised to never slap anyone again. Okay, that last one I made up. He never promised to stop slapping people himself.

You know how Wasi Zafar could have scored major brownie points in my book? All he had to do was come out and say: “Pervez Musharraf won’t take off his uniform until he damn well feels like it and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it. So go to hell all of you who can’t deal with it and take the Constitution along while you are at it.” I would have given him major points for honesty, not to mention for the “he-has-balls” factor. Of course he didn’t say any such thing nor is he likely to anytime in the future. Anything and everything he or anyone of the other cronies say about the President/General and his planned stay in both hot seats is and will always be as insipid and as predictable as the taste of last night’s leftover cheesecake.

I still remember October 12th, 1999. I had just staggered in, sans coffee, into a 9:00am Development Economics, taught by one of those highly respected faculty members that universities fight to have on their faculties because they are forever on the verge of winning a Noble Prize for some seminal work or the other. Worried about the problem set I had done a half-hearted , “this-is-my-last-semester” kind of a job with, I had skipped my daily morning routine of reading The News online to find the latest happenings in the motherland. The fact that the motherland was in uproar and everything had turned upside down on its head thus completely escaped me. As I walked into class, my Professor came up to me with a concerned look on his face. “Are you alright, Ms. A?” he said. “There’s been a coup in your country!” “Oh I see. Well, what’s new?” I shrugged.

As the day passed on and the reality of what had happened gradually sunk in, I tried calling my parents back in Lahore to find out what had been going on. Initially I couldn’t get through. All circuits were down. By the time I finally got a hold of them, I had worked myself up in a fit of “oh-my-motherland-what’s-happening-to-you” anxiety. Ignoring my panic-stricken tone, my parents cut to the chase and said everything was fine, everyone was really happy and the would-be Ameer-ul-Momineen was now cooling his ambitions in army custody in the company of other members of his “United” family. “See, all’s well that ends well. Everything always works out for the best” I told myself and those who asked. I have come to regret those words, many, many time since then.

The greatest tragedy of Pakistan and its people is perhaps simply that each incumbent government manages to rack up so many points on the “it-really-cannot-get-any-worse than-this” curve that each new government/usurper/tough-talking general is inevitably looked upon as a savior in disguise, a knight in shining armor, a messiah if you will. Maybe the expectations of a tired and disillusioned populace are so high or perhaps we are just genetically and geographically designed to suckered; whatever it is, each new government makes us yearn for those gone, to jail cells or foreign lands, locked either in the land or out of it and we slowly realize that the compromised angels weren’t those who were coming our way but rather those who were being dragged away in trumped up cases, their foreigner-saved-my-neck deals and disowned palaces and billions of stolen dollars hidden in foreign accounts waving cheerio right behind them.

I still remember Pervez Musharraf’s first official address to the nation. Here was a reluctant man, so obviously weighed down by the burden of all that he had taken on, trying to make things work, trying to listen and learn. In countless interviews during that time, he listened to criticisms, asked for ideas; displayed humility and an earnest desire to make things better. How many times did we all hear him repeat that he was not an Ayub or a Zia and that he would not glue himself to the chair for another eleven years. He would hold free and fair elections and then be out of the hot zone to retire peacefully, to play golf and have fun in the sun with his dogs. Of course all that mumbo jumbo was before the power lust struck him. If he gets himself elected again next year for another five year term and assuming he manages to complete it (which will be so barring an act of either God or the Americans), he will have been in power for a grand total of 13 years. Mathematics has never been my strong point but the last I checked, 13 was definitely a bigger number than 11.

How did it come to this? How did a man who, by all accounts, started out with upright intentions and a genuine desire to do well and improve the fate of his country come down to this? Down to the point where he will not let anything or anyone to stand in the way of his staying exactly where he is, right at the top, on his own terms, no matter what has to be compromised, given up, ripped apart and eventually sacrificed to do just that? How did a man who started out with “accountability” as his battle cry come to the point where men convicted by his own NAB, and rightly so (some of them having served prison time also), now grace his drawing rooms, his cabinet, his dinner tables, his offices as if the most respectable men in the blighted land? How long was that journey from being right to being wrong? How many goblets of power lust did he drink on the way? How long was the fall down from the pedestal of potential savior to the depths where no-one recognizes any longer why they once admired him? And finally, how long was that walk to take his place in that queue of miserable, power-hungry rulers that seems to stretch from the corridors of the hilly capital onto a miserable, never-ending eternity?

What makes me the angriest; more than the rampant lawlessness, the rocketing inflation, the spiraling unemployment, the increasing poverty, the wasteful expenditure, the unapologetic corruption, the bold nepotism, the whimsical foreign policy, the domestic strife, the gargantuan and ineffective cabinet, the lies we are fed everyday; what makes me the angriest is the how easily and guiltlessly our Constitution is raped, plundered, twisted, destroyed and then suitably recreated to cater to the whims of those in power. One Article after another is added or removed to remove all obstacles to staying in power. If the Constitution dictates that the President cannot hold two offices simultaneously, no problem; change it. If, after mutilation, it carries an amendment that states that he has to remove his uniform by a certain date, no problem; ignore it.

Why does this make me the angriest when there are so many other reasons to be angry? Perhaps because I understand that the Constitution is that one document in any land that should be held sacred above all others. Perhaps because I know that if its sanctity were conserved, so many other honors would also be preserved. Perhaps because I believe that if that document could be protected from plunder, so much else could also be. If my anger doesn’t strike similar chords within you, am I to assume that you do not understand what the Constitution of the country truly implies, what it upholds, who it protects and what it promises. This lack of understanding and apparent ignorance of the true value and dignity of the constitution that shrouds our nation can only be explained as a consistent institutional and leadership failure. How can we, as a nation, be expected to understand the value and meaning of the constitution when we have never been educated about it? When our leaders, both democratic and military, go right on about making a constant mockery out of it; twisting, turning, raping and plundering it to satisfy their own power lust; adding and subtracting from it to serve their own nefarious purposes. In our relatively brief history, the constitution has been abrogated four times. How can we then be expected to understand what it signifies, what it protects and whom it, ultimately, honors? Do we really understand what the constitution is and what it signifies? The constitution of any country is the contract the citizens of that country have with it and it is the one contract that is, and should be, absolutely non-negotiable.

Yet when it gets raped and plundered to satisfy the power lusts of those in power, who threatens to sue? Who cares? The most fundamental contract, the most sacrosanct one gets violated and nobody utters a mumble of protest. Why aren’t we, the citizens of this country, out on the streets, standing and protesting in front of the parliament, on the streets of our cities, outsides the gates of our homes, when that happens? Why? Because our buck isn’t involved? It’s our freedom that’s on the line: our democratic freedom, our security, our right to choose. Yet we do nothing. Indifference shrouds us. Perhaps our apathy stems from our collective ignorance. While our history teachers at school will drone on and on about Mughal emperors who died ages ago, no-one teaches us the importance of the constitution. No-one bothers to explain that this document guards your freedom and if ever it is violated, you are to rise up and scream your lungs out in protest. Scream and scream, individually, collectively, until someone bloody hears you.

Every so often, when questioned about the uniform, the General turns to inform us that he is still making his mind up; his nation needs him in the uniform; his nation wants him in the uniform. And who exactly informed him about our needs and our wants? His hand-picked mouth-pieces? When did our needs and wants start to matter so much to him? One or the other of the government puppets, in answer to the uniform issue, will always make it sound like given all the sectarian, inter-provincial and terrorist strife going on within our frontiers, the only glue holding it all together is the President in his uniform. They make it sound like the country will disintegrate (God forbid) if the President were to take of his uniform. What arrogance I say. Really? Is the President carrying the country solely on his uniformed shoulders? Is he the only one in this land of fourteen million people who has an IQ high enough to understand the intricacies of the problems we face? More importantly, is the government, and because they are supposed to be our representatives hence by implication, we all as a nation, are we all saying that this one man is indispensable?

The conservatives, the liberals, the rightists, the leftists, the extremists, the moderates; all of them are caught up in this web that the issue of the uniform has spun around itself. Views clash, concerns vary, and principles take a back seat. Many argue that only a President in uniform can take our messy political culture by its horns and straighten it out. True democracy can only be engineered by this President in his uniform they say. Really now? A man in uniform will bring us democracy? That is a paradox if there ever was and it isn’t going to fly. A man in uniform is trained to either receive orders or give orders and democracy cannot be ordered into existence. It is an institution that can only evolve through time and more importantly, through mistakes. Why this supreme arrogance of assuming that the masses have no brains and cannot tell right from wrong and thus like errant children need to be told what is best for them? If given democracy in its truest form, even if the masses are not fully enlightened and in all likelihood get swayed by passionate rhetoric, still, how long will they keep voting the wrong people into power? Once, twice, three times? Eventually, they will learn and get it right but to let them get it right, it is of paramount importance to first let them get it wrong, of their own free will. Yes we face a difficult time, a complex world today and we desperately need intelligent, upright and effective leadership but the world could be worse tomorrow and even more horrific the day after. Even if true democracy means a potential mess for Pakistan in the short run, still, we need it, we deserve it. How long should we hold out hoping for a better form of democracy in the long run? How long will we keep trading the long run for the short run? A famous economist once said that in the long run we will all be dead. What has to happen has to happen now. All future promises are null and void, empty words bouncing against the walls of a tomorrow which may never come.

We all crave democracy. We accept it in any half-baked form in which it is offered to us but do we understand that the foundation of any democracy stands upon the very document which grants it. The constitution of any land is its heart, mind and soul, its guardian angel, its life source, its fountainhead. Any violation of it is not to be tolerated. Pervez Musharraf may be the perfect man, the perfect leader but no matter how phenomenal he is, if he keeps violating the Constitution and continues abusing it by failing to take of his uniform, he is guilty of desecrating the constitution and thus deserves neither our respect nor our indulgence.

The government (and who are we kidding? his own hand-picked mouthpieces) will have us believe that the President in his uniform is the savior we have all been waiting for, the one who will solve all our problems and turn our troubled land into a veritable paradise, a fantastical Eden. Regardless of whether we like it or not, irrespective of what part of the most sacred constitution is being violated, the President will not take off his uniform. And what will we, as a nation, as laymen, as the populace of this land do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Political parties raise a half-hearted, lame-ass hue and cry but their intentions are not above question, their purpose too is nefariously selfish. A few more secret deals with leaders and they too will shut up and sit down. And we? The rest of us? We might utter a few words of protest and then we will believe the lies on offer because that will be our excuse for rationalizing our own helplessness and justifying our own refusal to do anything about it. Then we will sit back and hope that Pervez Musharraf, our President in uniform, a man who will keep violating the Constitution in order to keep on his uniform, is indeed that savior he is made out to be. And when time and history are done with him, we will wait for another savior and then another and then another. We will absolve ourselves of all responsibility, let our precious constitution get raped, let democracy be plundered, sitting back complacently waiting for saviors to come and deliver us to an Eden which will never exist. Today, tomorrow, the day after, we will wait for them. And the saviors will never come. No matter how much we want them, no matter how much we pray for them, no matter how we need them: they will never come, not to us, a people, a nation that does not understand, respect, value and honor its own constitution, its own guarantee of freedom, its own birthright to existence.