General Pervez Musharraf is becoming quite the embarrassment for Southasia, as an autocrat who thinks he can get away with hurling untenable accusations against the high judiciary, and making bald pronouncements that go against the democratic, pluralistic order. Seeking to retain power through the bogey of fundamentalism and insurgency while banking on the decades of near-continuous military control of Pakistani society, the general dares to exhibit certitude and arrogance rather than the statesman's humility.
Appearing on state-owned PTV on 3 November, the day he invoked the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO), Gen Musharraf took time out to tell the Western world that it was unrealistic to expect the same type and quality of democracy in Pakistan as overseas. Inherent in that argument was a breathtaking denigration of the Pakistani people, as if they did not deserve the democracy practiced by 'civilised' society. Indeed, we beg to defer with the presidente-generalissimo: the citizens of Pakistan have every right to the basic tenets of representative democracy – including free, fair and timely elections; government by consent; the protection of fundamental freedoms; and an army confined to the barracks. If all this is inconvenient to the general, he should at least desist from maligning his own citizenry through false justifications.
The naked clampdown on the Pakistani media has also indicated the value system that guides Gen Musharraf. Some have credited him in the past for being relatively lenient on the press. But the fact is that, during and following his 1999 coup, he had never had to face any real threat from the media. This time, when both the print and electronic media became vociferously critical of the PCO and the imposition of the state of emergency, the general showed his true colours. He seemed most perturbed by the independence of the popular Urdu-language news channels, which is why the undeclared martial-law administration went after them with a vengeance – to the extent even of inveighing upon the Dubai authorities to prevent any uplinking from there.
The 1999 coup was against the political parties, but the November 2007 situation was in a real sense a coup conducted against the judiciary. When it became clear that the upright (and reinstated, against the regime's best efforts) Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and his panel of justices would hand down a judgement against his election to the presidency, the general decided to act, and quickly. He blamed the judges for having encouraged terrorism and invited anarchy, and put them under house arrest – while simultaneously packing the Supreme Court and the provincial high courts with quisling judges expected to stamp any piece of paper put before them.