“Political speech and writing,” says George Orwell is largely the “defense of the indefensible.” So if the literary genius read General Pervez Musharraf’s memoir, In The Line of Fire, What would he say?

Though most of the world knows George Orwell for his book, Animal Farm, I remember him for the essay called, Politics and The English Language. It is his classic work on all political writing to date.

Orwell deconstructs bad writing by politicians and fascists alike with ease, but I feel that he would be in quiet a fix with Musharraf’s book, and wouldn’t know what to make of it really.

Back in my college days, I carved George Orwell out in my mind as the only standard for the oxymoron: political truth-telling. He was someone I could go back to again when I heard state television news, or flipped though some Indian opinion piece on Kashmir.

Now that I have read Musharraf’s Memoir, I wondered if I should go back to Orwell, or shall I put a value on the popularity that this head of state of a developing country has on, say, the Jon Stewart show. For years, studying in the US as an international student, my fantasy has been to get a Pakistani face, on the US media and into the homes of the average American. I bet if I was still in America, I would gloat on how Musharraf has managed converge all technologies, from the branded publishing house to the community radio shows to sing to the tune of his life and his country.

I’m in Lahore though and my country is headed by a military dictator who can neither be dictator enough to do away with the extra-constitutional Hudood laws, nor benevolent enough to resign as army chief and stand for elections. Filp-flopping between appeasing the mullahs and the west, he plays to the theater by walking the much acclaimed tightrope of a moderate Muslim country’s leader, all on Pakistan’s expense.

Orwell asked readers of political literature to notice how the word “democracy” is used in a “consciously dishonest way” and notice that when we say that a country is democratic “we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”

When I bought the memoir, angry, I thought I was ready to unleash Orwell onto it. I thought I could circle a few embarrassing quotes from Musharraf that have “private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” I also thought I could pick out bad writing of a pre-teen Secret Seven adventure, with clichés like, “I had no time to lose” and prove that he assumed too much authority. I thought I could point to the images of a decapitated face skin of a bomber who tried to assassinate him and say that it was in bad taste, that he was using an image of war to define urgency which reflects the decay of his political thought. I wanted him to stop condemning earlier politicians for banning liquor and making Friday a public holiday, and begin by undoing their wrong if he cared enough.

It wasn’t that simple though, I noticed that Pervez Musharraf steers clear from George Orwell’s most cautioned malaise – Lack of Clarity.

Musharraf has seemed to remedy with his clear, crisp and honest language the very nature of political language which Orwell says is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Musharraf labels rot as rot, and if his story is to be believed he never would be a dictator, nor does he support the interference of the military into politics, as he explains at length, for the right reasons too.

Any witness to the history that maps his last 10 years has reason to substantiate the circumstances that led to his rise as army chief and supreme leader of Pakistan. Fortunately for our times, we don’t have to wait two generations to have declassified information to us. Thanks to Simon and Schuster’s profits we know that any leader acting in self interest will publish truthfully.

Any learned American inspired by the Jeffersonian ethic will like this book, so will a solider, a republican or a democrat with a commitment to minority rights. Refreshingly though, the book isn’t written for the American, as much as it resonates with the nationalist Pakistani with the Jinnahist ethic – the secular democratic Pakistan that is successfully liberal because of its culturally Islamic background rather than despite it.

Despite the clarity with which Musharraf approaches the book, he cannot be pardoned for the mistakes he’s made in real governance. One only wishes he walked his text.

Musharraf, as a young boy, escaping the violence of the Hindu mobs before Pakistan was created, says he cried on the day Pakistan’s founder, Barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah died. A claim no one can testify to, but the nobility of which is not lost, for it to deserve mention in this world best-seller. Yet, I find that Musharraf’s understanding of the political history of Pakistan’s creation is a bit shallow. Had he really understood how much Jinnah’s Pakistan is violated in the attack on the parliament’s sovereignty, he would have stepped down as army chief the first date at which the Supreme Court mandate expired.

Moreover, the lengthy chapters he assigned to the “corruption and plunder of national wealth” that he blames on previous two rulers does not even come close to the institutionalized corruption that the Pakistan Army indulges in, by awarding land deeds and a life of luxury to its officers, all for nothing.

Having said that, there is probably no doubt in the fact that if there is an army chief that can give “India a bloody nose” and live to sell about it, its Pervez Musharraf.

Kargil was a reaction to what he revealed to be an attempt by India to claim that the area insurgents were moving forward on the line of control in Kashmir, and use it as a cause belli to launch an attack. Details as he laid them out, made Kargil to be a successful operation because it exposed Indian belligerence, prevented an all out war and put Kashmir back on the international agenda with possible talks for peace. Not to mention a hilarious expose on how the Indian army took advantage of the communication wall with Pakistan to dramatize false attacks and award medals to officers, apparently leading to court martial when later discovered.

If not for nothing the book ought to be praised for the fire it lit in enough Indian Intelligentsia, which for years has invested millions of dollars into heinous and very negative propaganda about Pakistan.

Musharraf and his Clint Eastwood title, should also get the credit of knowing the pulse of Hollywood. He drove a point home about the movie, Black Hawk Down to emphasize how it was the Pakistan army who went out and “extracted” the US soldiers ambushed in Mogadishu, contrary to what was made the US army credit. If he clarified even that, Orwell I am sure wouldn’t know what’s worse, A dictator who writes clearly, or one who rules with contradictions.

Let’s be clear about this though. Musharraf will go down a famous man in History. Precisely because he did what Orwell said was the best remedy – “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.”

Can we hope that this new wave of popularity can still inspire him to fulfill his manifold promises that he held out to the nation in that fateful October month in 1999, when we did away with the “dreadful decade of democracy?”