Former Pakistani President and dictator General Pervez Musharraf’s death in Dubai is a stark reminder of the country’s delicate and frosty relationship with those who wield power at their prime, but end up paying dearly and often in exile. Musharraf, the last military dictator of Pakistan, followed a template similar to two of his predecessors, General Ayub Khan and General Zia-ul-Haq, of turning their political masters into immediate foes. Military dictatorship is all about replacing the political elite, and a key highlight of Pakistan’s regular disarray into dictatorship has been the swiftness with which the slide has occurred.
Within days of Iskander Mirza, the last Governor-General and first President of Pakistan, declaring martial law in October 1958, General Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistani army, took over the reins of the country. Mirza was promptly banished to England where he remained in exile till his death in 1969. Similarly, General Zia-ul-Haq, who was appointed the army chief by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Bhutto in 1976, replaced him in a military coup in July 1977. Bhutto was hanged in 1979 in what is now known as “judicial murder” on trumped up charges.
Musharraf, from an Urdu-speaking Muhajir family, was handpicked by Nawaz Sharif in 1998 to be the army chief. Overlooking the usual stock of Punjabi-origin generals, Musharraf’s elevation to the top was seen to be Sharif’s attempt to keep the army in check by having a pliable general. But following the tradition of Ayub Khan and Zia-ul-Haq, Musharraf decimated Nawaz Sharif by taking over the reins of Pakistan. But before the coup happened, there was the Kargil war, which is now universally accepted as Musharraf’s handiwork keeping Nawaz Sharif in the dark.
Pakistani soldiers took up Indian positions in Kargil but, following a successful pushback from India and international condemnation, had to yield it back to the Indian army. This opened up a power struggle between Sharif and Musharraf, which culminated in the infamous endangerment of the lives of 200 passengers in a PIA flight from Colombo to Karachi in October 1999.
Musharraf was among the passengers returning from Colombo after representing Pakistan in a state function. Minutes after the PIA flight had left Colombo, Sharif had dismissed Musharraf as the army chief, and air traffic controllers were not giving permission to land the flight in Karachi to the dismay of the PIA pilots. The pilots were instead told to go to Oman or worse still land in India, where Musharraf was most likely to be arrested.
But Sharif’s civilian coup was short-lived. Musharraf’s trusted generals got a whiff of the plan and rushed to the Karachi airport. The PIA flight finally landed with just a few minutes of fuel to spare.
Sharif was charged with hijacking of the airline and it was only an intervention by the US that got him sent to Saudi Arabia into exile in 2000. With Sharif gone, and basking in the glory of being painted as a different kind of dictator by the West, Musharraf was by now riding high.
In June 2001, he appointed himself as the President while being the army chief and found himself in the thick of the US-led war on terrorism. The West realised Pakistan and Musharraf were indispensable in the offensive against Osama Bin Laden. He did peddle influence from Washington but irked the Islamists by closely aligning Pakistan with the US. To burnish his credentials, he pursued the policy of bleeding Kashmir, and won a referendum to be the President for the next five years in 2002 when Islamabad and New Delhi were on the brink of a war. The referendum was widely believed to be rigged, but it did cement him to power.
The supporting role Pakistan played in the US war on terror did not go down well with the Islamists. He also faced opposition from secular, civil leaders for not doing much to reign in the extremists. By 2007 he faced court cases, street protests and calls from fundamentalists to have him killed. But it was the run in with Iftikhar Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, that proved to be his undoing. He fired Chaudhry but faced with violent and intense protests by lawyers across the country, Chaudhry was reinstated.
Musharraf then stitched up a deal with Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to continue as President while she would be the prime minister, with corruption cases against her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari being withdrawn. The election took place in October 2007 which was boycotted by the opposition as he was running to be the president while continuing to head the army. In response to the Supreme Court hearing challenges to his re-election, Musharraf declared a state of emergency. The chief justice was dismissed, restrictions imposed on the media, following which Benazir Bhutto rescinded the power sharing deal.
Sensing the mood of the public, Musharraf resigned from the army and became a civilian president in December 2007. A general election was scheduled in January 2008, but following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto it was postponed. In February 2008, when the elections finally took place, a coalition led by Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari came into power. Very soon, they started taking steps to have Musharraf impeached, but before that could happen, he resigned in August 2008 thus ending his nearly decade-long reign. He left Pakistan.
In October 2010, he established the All Pakistan Muslim League, but he didn’t make much headway despite travelling to Pakistan in 2013 to run for elections. Nawaz Sharif’s government was determined to come back to him. His bank accounts were frozen, and he was handed a travel ban which was lifted only in 2016, allowing him to travel to Dubai for medical treatment.
But back in Pakistan he faced charges for the killing of Benazir Bhutto and treason for which a special court awarded him the death penalty in 2019. Vast sections of the Pakistan army were uncomfortable with their former chief branded a traitor. This was quickly overturned but Musharraf remained in Dubai since 2016, where he died in a hospital on February 5, 2023. Just like Nawaz Sharif, Musharraf’s exile, in Dubai, was also worked out with the intervention of the US.
Musharraf joins a long list of Pakistani leaders who breathe their last away from the country they once ruled. Iskander Mirza who was the first President of Pakistan was banished to England, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the fifth Prime Minister of Pakistan died a forlorn man in Lebanon. The Bhuttos and the Sharifs have lived in exile for long periods.
Three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose brother is now the prime minister of Pakistan, himself is in the UK after having lived for a long time in Saudi Arab in the 2000s. Musharraf’s death in a Dubai hospital also marks the end of a class of establishment elites who were born in undivided India and reached the political apex in Pakistan.
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