[ Generally Speaking ]

And when he said, "Extremists have gone very extreme," it suddenly
occurred to me why his speech pattern seemed so familiar. He was that
uncle that you get stranded with at a family gathering when everybody
else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky left in the
bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound --
if you would only pour him one last one.

by Mohammed Hanif

Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf deserves our sympathy

Not because he has been forced to carry out a coup against his own
regime, not because his troops are being kidnapped en masse by
Pakistani Taliban and then awarded Rs 500 for good behaviour, not
because he himself has become a prisoner in his Army House and can't
even nip out for coffee and Paan as he used to, but because he has
utterly lost his grip over grammar.

In my 15 years in journalism, I have covered three coups. And as I
walked towards my office last Saturday, I had the cynicism of someone
who has seen it all before. As I entered the BBC offices on a chilly
Saturday afternoon in London, a senior Pakistan hand, who like me had
interrupted his cosy weekend to cover the story, wondered aloud why
the general was taking so long before appearing on national television
and explaining his actions.

"His speech writer is too old for all this excitement. He is probably
taking his time," I said. Barrister Sharifuddin Peerzada has midwifed
every single coup in Pakistan and when General Musharraf took over in
1999, we had to wait until 3 am for him to address the nation. The
nation listened to his 10 minutes of neatly turned out verbosity and,
relieved, went to sleep. Peerzada may lack in democratic credentials,
but he cares about his syntax.

Last Saturday as I arrived at my desk, Musharraf had already started
his address. And it was immediately clear to me that he had fallen
into that aging dictator's familiar trap: He had written his own
speech.

I exaggerate because he only occasionally glanced at his notes and
for 40 minutes talked, well, gibberish; the kind of stuff that only
journalists and think-tank-wallahs would take seriously.

I was so unsettled -- not by what he was saying, but by the way he
was saying it -- that I listened to the entire speech again last
night.

I have been accused of punctuation abuse often enough to take these
things in my stride, but for the 40 minutes that General Musharraf
spoke in Urdu, he didn't use one proper sentence.

He replaced his verbs with hand gestures, nouns slipped off his
shrugged shoulders, adjectives quivered under his desk.

And when he said, "Extremists have gone very extreme," it suddenly
occurred to me why his speech pattern seemed so familiar. He was that
uncle that you get stranded with at a family gathering when everybody
else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky left in the
bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound --
if you would only pour him one last one.

Consider this; in the middle of his speech when everyone was silently
urging him to get to the point, losing the thread of his diatribe
about how judicial activism was responsible for the rise of jihadis in
Pakistan, he abruptly said, "I have imposed emergency," then looked
into the camera, waved his hand in a dismissive gesture and said, "You
must have seen it on TV."

He forgot to mention that he had pulled the plug on all television
channels except the State-run television. It might sound like
old-school dictator talk, but just imagine if somebody took away your
television and then told you, 'Oh, did you see that thing on TV?'

For those who haven't suffered General Musharraf's regime directly,
he can come across as a rakish figure, a daredevil who easily switches
between his camouflage commando uniform and designer suits and then
half sleeved shirts for attending fashion shows -- his favourite
cultural activity before he was forced to abandon it because of
security concerns.

His CV is impressive: Here is a man who can manage the frontline on
America's war and terror, get rid of three prime ministers and scores
of generals and still find time to write an autobiography and then get
George W Bush to endorse it in front of the world media.

I visited Delhi soon after Musharraf's failed Agra summit and he
seemed to have earned the grudging respect of the Delhi elite. My
Indian colleagues looked at stone-faced Vajpayee and wondered, why
can't the new shining India have a handsome leader like Musharraf. One
south Delhi resident claimed his wife had started watching Pakistani
channels obsessively just to get a glimpse of our commando President.

I reminded my Indian friend of Musharraf's Kargil adventure. "How
come you have forgotten your Kargil widows so soon?" I said. "Well
come off it, he is a bit of a matinee idol from the fifties," I was
told. I am not a big fan of period Bollywood, so I kept quiet.

As I watched the speech this Saturday, I wondered if my Indian
friend's wife saw the same Musharraf that I saw on my screen. He was
like that uncle that I mentioned earlier, who after a couple of drinks
not only wants to explain the meaning of life, but also why he is the
most misunderstood man in the world, how your aunt never valued him,
why the world is run by a cabal of Jewish gays and why Japanese
technology is a disgrace.

You want to take the bottle away and tell him to get some sleep. He
wants to tell you he loves you more than his own son and now can you
pour him another drink.

I am not even remotely suggesting that Musharraf was drunk when he
addressed the nation. No, it was something far more sinister. He
seemed to be having an out of body experience, there he sat in his
sherwani reading an order written by his uniformed alter ego, wagging
a finger at himself, accusing his own government of spreading
terrorism.

And let's not forget that when I say Pakistani government, I mean
General Pervez Musharraf.

Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were
said quite randomly:

Yes, he did say, "Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai (extremism has
become too extreme)."

"Hum se koi darta hi nahin (nobody is scared of us anymore)."

"Islamabad mein extremist bharay houay hain (Islamabad is full of extremists)."

"Hakumat ke andar hakumat bana rakhi hai (there is a government
within government)."

"Har waqt bas court ke chakkar lagatey rehtay hain (officials are
being asked to go to the courts every other day)."

"Officials ki beizzati kartay hain (officials are being insulted by
the judiciary)."

At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first
three years in power -- "mera total control thha (I had total
control)." You were almost tempted to ask: What happened then, uncle?

But obviously, uncle didn't need any prompting. He launched into his
routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was about to
launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it, he
managed to make it sound like the Final Solution). And just when you
thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and
plunged into a deep pool of self pity.

This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme Court
judges would rather attend a colleagues' daughter's wedding rather
than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional
President.

As I said, I have heard some dictator speeches in my life, but nobody
has gone so far as to mention someone's daughter's wedding for
imposing martial law in the country.

When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience
in the West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation.
This part of his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I
felt humiliated that my President not only thinks that we are not
evolved enough for things like democracy and human rights, but because
we can't even handle concepts like proper syntax and grammar.

Abraham Lincoln was quoted. The slow and painful evolution of Western
democracy was evoked. Idealists were told to manage their expectations
and then there was the obligatory poetic flourish: "I would not let
this country commit suicide."

Sure, a colleague chipped in, I would rather strangle it with my own hands.

As he closed his speech with a rather poetic "forever Pakistan,
forever," and the national anthem started to play, it occurred to me
that our whole nation is probably feeling like a Kargil widow by now.

With no cable television to console her sorrows.

Mohammed Hanif is the head of BBC's Urdu Service. His novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes will be published by Random House India next year.
http://us.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/06guest.htm

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