Author: Shekhar Gupta
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 14, 2002
URL: http://www.indian-express.com/full_story.php?content_id=9436
It's said in New York that the September
session of the UN General Assembly is when leaders from the Third World
arrive to deliver long addresses not so much to the international community
as to their own people back home. This applies even more to despots and
dictators. What better way to flaunt legitimacy before your own tyrannised
population than the image of yourself holding forth in the assembly of
the world?
Musharraf's performance at the UNGA
this week belongs firmly in that category. That's why he doesn't care if
parts of his speech may have gone right over the heads of the other delegates.
What, for example, they would have wondered, was he ranting about when
he talked of persecution and ethnic cleansing in India not merely against
Muslims but also Christians, Sikhs and ''Scheduled Castes.'' Several times
more Christians have been killed in his own country by fundamentalist thugs
in one year than in the entire history of Hindu- Christian discord over
conversions in India.
The ''Sikh problem'' was over nearly
a decade ago and the leading Sikh party is an ally in the ruling coalition.
So is the dominant Dalit (or ''Scheduled Caste'') party. His speechwriters
are not even aware that it was a long time back that even in India the
expression Scheduled Caste went out of use, to be replaced with Dalit.
If he had at least used the more uncivil expression, ''untouchable,'' somebody
in that august hall may even have understood him. But the general is not
to be bothered about such nuances. Nor is he to be confused overly with
facts. A closed, cantonment mindset, disturbed by forebodings of defeat
makes an incendiary cocktail.
You don't have to be a Kautilya
or Kissinger to figure out the reasons behind this frustration. If on the
first anniversary of 9/11, the strongman of Pakistan, hailed as a key ally
in the West's war against terror has to talk, instead, about Gujarat and
the fate of Dalits in India, something must have gone very wrong with his
script. But put yourself in his jackboots. Just a little over a year ago,
he had walked out of the summit in Agra in a huff, refusing to accept even
the reference to cross- border terrorism in the declaration.
Now, he has been making the promise
to not allow the use of Pakistani soil for terrorism of any kind, against
anybody, almost once every week. He had to say so even in this speech.
What cross-border terrorism, his spokesmen had asked in Agra, Kashmir has
an LoC. Now he has to go on and on saying he is allowing no incursions
across the LoC. His Taliban card has been smashed by daisy- cutters and
buried under Afghan soil. Now he has to tell the United Nations that his
government fully supports Hamid Karzai and his Northern Alliance-backed
interim administration in Kabul. The same Pakistan that treated the Northern
Alliance and its leader Ahmed Shah Masoud as its Enemy No. 2, after India.
If, in the process, in an entire
year of backtracking, he had received even one word of encouragement on
Kashmir from the US, he would not have been so angry. He has so far been
promised just the prospect of a dialogue with India once elections in Jammu
and Kashmir are over and the international community are convinced that
infiltration has ended conclusively. This, and more, he already had at
Agra before he blew it in a one- hour flourish before the camera at his
breakfast show.
Today, he says elections in Kashmir
are a farce, that they will be rigged and that they will not solve any
problem. The American big brother then responds by saying the opposite:
that the election is a significant first step towards peace, that it is
an encouraging development and that they are leaning on Pakistan to not
allow terrorist interference in the process.
What must anger him even more are
the images of people turning up for election rallies in deep, terror-stricken
northern Kashmir, even proxy candidates of the Peoples Conference drawing
crowds and the indications that whatever the level of popular bitterness,
that despite the slogans of Azadi, the mood this time is different than
in 1996. What else could be a bigger setback to his Kashmir ambitions?
The general's life is further complicated
by his own sliding moral authority. Just when the fourth and final phase
of the Kashmir election is over, he will be holding his own national and
provincial elections. Now, howsoever imperfect the J&K elections may
turn out to be, they will be more than a bit more legitimate than the farce
he will be staging.
Several Pakistani dictators in the
past have disturbed John Locke in his grave by producing original ideas
of democracy. Ayub had ''guided'' democracy and Zia had a partyless election.
Now Musharraf will produce an entirely new concept: a pre-rigged election
resulting in a pre-rigged power structure.
He has disqualified almost all the
key political figures and is now working hard to instal his own, ''King's
Party'' in power. Of all his television performances, one of the more significant
was one that most of us missed because CNN and BBC did not telecast it.
But on live PTV, he held forth at a press conference in Islamabad, explaining
his so-called constitutional amendments.
It will be a truly democratic set-up,
he said so many times. The elected government will make the foreign, economic,
educational, all kinds of policies. ''I will not intrude,'' he said, ''but
they know that if they don't behave, I will sort them out.''
Welcome, therefore, to an entirely
new idea of democracy. Here is somebody who is so outraged we have a ''rubber
stamp'' president when everybody knows that that office is merely titular
in India. He is, meanwhile working so determinedly to instal a rubber-stamp
Prime Minister and wants you to call it real democracy.
But democracy is a cute monster.
Once you unleash it, you can never tell what shape it will take, how it
will grow, where it will bite you. At the same televised tutorial on his
constitutional amendments, a pesky Pakistani reporter asked him a cruel
question: ''The three major parties (PPP, PML and MQM) are working on an
alliance. The leaders of all three (Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Altaf
Hussain) are in exile. If the alliance comes to power, won't they be remote-
controlling the government from overseas?''
And what was the general's reply?
''You have painted the worst possible scenario. But it is possible...''
It is more possible that the good
general would manage to avert the ''worst.'' It would then be inevitable
that the international community as well as his own people, and those of
Kashmir, would compare elections in India with those in his pre-rigged
''democracy.'' Who knows, not long after that, the people of Gujarat may
even have defeated Narendra Modi in their elections. What would the general
complain about next? India's inability to prevent booth-capturing in Bihar?
Earlier this month, The New York
Times noted in a scathing editorial that ''Dick Cheney's recent calls for
bringing democracy to Iraq ring hollow as long as Washington is silent
about General Musharraf's arbitrary rule in Pakistan.'' It is difficult
to say yet what elections in Kashmir would achieve for India. But his own
election is beginning to look more and more like one more sorry joke to
prolong that same arbitrary rule.
Who knows, once the US opens a new
front in Iraq and its attention moves away from South Asia, it may suddenly
discover it doesn't need even this dictator so desperately after all. The
general is far too smart not to see that writing on the wall. Hence the
anger and frustration. Hence the touching concern for India's ''Scheduled
Castes.''
(Write to sg@expressindia.com)
