Over the past week, we’ve had both the “Musharraf: bad” and the “Musharraf: not so bad” points of view represented at Sepia Mutiny. What we haven’t had is the “Musharraf: seriously weird, yo” point of view, which strikes me as a grave omission. Fortunately, here is a column from Mohammed Hanif (via Amitava Kumar), who has been reporting on the coup-within-a-coup for the BBC from London.
Hanif was disturbed after watching Musharraf’s 40 minute speech last Saturday announcing the state of Emergency. The speech had a long Urdu section and a brief English section directed at the west. The English section was more or less unexceptionable (Abraham Lincoln was mentioned), but the part of the speech that was in Urdu was apparently quite the opposite:
[H]e 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. (link)
It gets better:
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. (link)
And here are some direct lines in Urdu:
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).” (link)
The entire Urdu speech has been posted at YouTube, in four parts: one, two, three, and four. I have to admit my Urdu is not really up to par, so if anyone wants to see if Mohammed Hanif’s brilliantly snarky comments on the speech can be verified, I would be grateful.
Update: a rough English translation of the speech is here (thanks, Ikram).
Heh. I think he’s realized that he has lost control & is too terrified to come up with a workable plan B.
Somewhere out there Jibril and Raphael are oiling up their shehnais.
Manan Ahemd did a translation for non-Urdu speakers at icga.blogspot.com, for thoe that are interested.
What’s really interesting is to compare Musharraf’s second coup speech to his first coup speech, back in the Fall of 1999. That was (I think) almost all in English. There’s a lot of stuff behind the choice of Urdu (or any South Asian vernacular) or English in making this kind of speech — the intended audience, the level of authority of familiarity intended, etc.
I’m just a bit too young to remember Zia’s coup –did he give his speech in Urdu or English?
look, you can’t rule and think at the same time. mushie realizes that staecraft is 90% physical, the other half is mental.
its getting very hard to get a converstion going about pakistan. everybody is talking too much. if people don’t want democracy, nobody’s going to stop them. anyway, at this rate nobody goes to pakistan any more, it’s too crowded. but i do agree that mushie should not compare himself to lincoln. If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.
but its not over until its over, and you can observe a lot by watching. You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there. sooner or later pakistan will come to that fork in the road. they should take it.
hope this clears things up.
The army realized the judiciary is developing a backbone and they decided to break it. The judges and the lawyers are the only “extremists” being fought. Musharraf’s illegitimate gov’t is giving bullshit excuses for the emergency and noone is really calling him on it. Pakistanis are going to wake up from this and realize that their justice system is gone and the only judiciary left will be army monkeys. Try getting real justice from them.
It seems the average pakistani doesnt mind the emergency apart from their TV being cut off and them missing out on the sensationalism.
Is it appropriate to call the latest declaration of emergency by Musharraf as a coup? I understand he came to power by way of a coup. Interested to know if there is a difference.
Mush looks like the best bet for Pakistan right now. I don’t see a viable nation-wide democratic alternative. Benazir Bhutto is much worse, not to mention she wouldn’t have the reins of the army. It’s best to be able to talk to the person who’s really in charge.
Repartee to hang one’s topee on.
And then, we have our bean counters pontificate.
sure man, mush’s value proposition is a growth in gross gdp owing to democratic appreciation while paying off the dictatorship at a rate of 7% interest paid monthly over an amortization period of 15 years. it looks like a bargain yarr. the alternative would be to have a bunch of no-name individuals without a history in portfolio management handle pakistan.
khoofia, the article turned me off when he jokes around about India’s Kargil widows. Disgusting.
And call me crazy, but the speech itself made sense to me in the context of Pak history.
By the way, here’s an article on the so-called savior of Pakistani democracy: The kleptocrat in a Hermès headscarf by Jemima Goldsmith, Imran Khan’s ex-wife.
Extreme cat is extreme.
Amardeep, interesting post, though slightly tongue-in-cheek, I would imagine!
The entire speech as it was broadcast on PTV is actually available on http://pakistanvision.com here. The speech starts at 4:40 (before that there is a preamble, including the religious invocation – first in Arabic then in Urdu, and then the national anthem).
But it is all in one piece, without editing and cropping as sometimes happens in youtube.
This will seem like picking nits, but since you asked, I would translate what he actually said at 6:55-7:02 in the clip – “daishatgardi aur intehapasandi meri nazar mein intehaa par pahunchi huin hain” as ‘Terrorism and extremism, in my view, have crossed all bounds!’. (This in itself is quite an admission)
The actual quote is “Balkay, law enforcement agencies se dar hi nahin rahen hain” (at 7:32-7:37) which I would translate as “In fact, they’re not scared even of the law enforcement agencies”.
The actual quote (8:00 – 8:11) is “Afsos ki baat yeh hai, ke yeh Islamabad, yaani the heart of Pakistan, the capital of Pakistan, is mein bhi, intehaa-pasandi phail gayi hai” which I translate literally as “The tragedy is that, in Islamabad, that is, the heart of Pakistan, the capital of Pakistan, even here, extremism has spread.”
Close. The actual quote (8:24-8:27) is “Hakoomat ke andar hakoomat chalaana chaah rahen hain”. I translate this as “They want to run a government within a government” (He also says the phrase in English just before the Urdu)
The quote (9:32-9:43) is “Tamaam senior odhaydaar, hakoomat ke, woh, courts ke chakkar lagaa rahe hain, khaas taur se Supreme Court ke.” which I would translate as “Senior government officials are having to go to the courts often, especially to the Supreme Court.”
Again, close. The actual quote (9:44 – 9:49) is “Unko sazaayen di jaa rahin hain, unki beizzati ki jaa rahi hai” – which I translate as “They are being punished, they are being affronted.”
And his reference to “what you saw on TV” is to the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO), the news of whose promulgation seems to have been broadcast on PTV just before he started speaking.
The English portion of his speech is 40:10-48:08. Some more Urdu, and then the speech ends at 51:05. National anthem closes out.
Of course, doing all of this, I haven’t checked out Mohammed Hanif’s website. The translation in Ikram’s link is good, there are some very minor elisions – nothing to even quibble about.
Whew!
Chachaji, I didn’t think to translate. Yes, that article is just a misleading rant and the title quote in this article is libelous; the speech itself in the original language is actually quite sensible and honest (to me anyway). I think Musharraf has Pakistan’s interests at heart, and imo he is the best person available to lead that country atm.
violence in bengal! law and order is in peril. i hereby call for a dictatorship in india to save us from ourselves.
lurker, dictatorships don’t work in India (thankfully). Politicians have equal opportunity lust for power to let just one person take it all over ;).
all i’m saying is give police a chance. i think these politicians should all be locked up so a great administrator like narendra modi could take over the country and show us how great we can be.
Talk about extremism – Justice Bhagwandas wasn’t allowed to celebrate Diwali with his family.
It was in Urdu. Surprisingly there are not many Zia ul Haq’s speeches available online.
Sorry for multiple comments but Mushie is getting confused,
though slightly exaggerated the Lincoln quote/reference by Musharraf was very apt. Looking at it a from un-american/non western angle it is kind of right. America goes into the overdrive in promoting democracy all over the world whereas its own democracy has taken hundreds of years to mature.
as if bushims werent enough for this world now we have mushisms
Given that the voter % in the US presidential elections over the past two decades has hovered around 50% and we may be looking at a 28-year Bush-Clinton dynasty, looks like the maturing is a bit over-rated. And all that distribution of democracy around the globe hasn’t helped either. 😉
“Extremists have become very extreme”
The new, improved EXXXTREME Extremism! Makes all other extremism look tame! (With a dash of lemon.)
PS. This is what Mush actually said: “Terrorism and extremism [in Pakistan] have crossed all limits.” (dehshatgardi aur intehapasandi [meri nazar mein] intehaa par pahunch gayi hain)
Hush Neena. We don’t talk about mis-treatment of minorities. Unless they happen to be in India. 😉
“Justice Bhagwandas wasn’t allowed to celebrate Diwali with his family”
I am elated to know that someone named Bhagwandas was/is a Justice in the Supreme Court of Pakistan.
Come on Amit – there is no evidence that Justice Bhagwandas is being mistreated because he is a Hindu. He is being mistreated, along with other colleagues, for refusing to take the oath under Musharraf’s new PCO.
What his personal example – not only of rising to Supreme Court judgeship, but also becoming the Acting Chief Justice, chairing the Court during what was arguably one of the most important cases it has ever heard – as a Hindu in an Islamic Republic – shows me that while things are bad for Hindus in Pakistan, they are not nearly as bad as one might be led to think.
Incidentally, when the crisis broke in March, he was in India on a religious trip – and, if reportage is to be believed, was actually unavailable and unreachable to his colleagues on the Bench. He returned as scheduled originally, even though the crisis was unfolding – took his oath on the day he was supposed to be back anyway, and served as Acting CJ. It is to the great credit of the Establishment in Pakistan that while there was comment and opinion expressed in different quarters that he should not be allowed to so serve because he was not Muslim – these were essentially overruled and things proceeded without a hitch, at least on this account.
Now – speculating – India has had some Muslim CJs – but if any of them had been in Pakistan when a major crisis broke in India – or in fact, even if there was no crisis – the amount of hue and cry that would be raised would have been deafening – and if the stakes were as high as they were in Pakistan in the case Justice Bhagwandas chaired – it is an open question how things would actually have turned out for India’s judiciary and secularism in this instance.
India is not all good, and not all bad. Similarly, Pakistan is also not all good, and not all bad.
Only recently, by the way, the Pakistan Military Academy graduated a Sikh cadet and commissioned him into the Pakistan Army. The Pakistan Air Force also recently commissioned women as fighter pilots, which Abhi has blogged.
Such things seem incredible to me, probably because, like many if not most Indians, I had formed a view of Pakistan where such things were impossible. But when things change on the ground, I must appropriately modify my view – if necessary, retrospectively, and develop a more nuanced one in its place. I hope others will, too.
On a general note – the biggest change I see on the ground in recent days – is that the Pakistan Establishment is realizing that the ‘daishatgard’ are as much against them, as they are against Karzai’s government, and against India. So the first, ginger steps towards a confederation will be greater internal and external policy coordination against this common threat. And this is what we are beginning to see. India’s ‘muted’ reaction towards developments in Pakistan is a signal in this direction. The joint sovereignty over Kashmir also may not get spelt out explicitly – there will just be a tacit acknowledgement of it. Meanwhile, SAFTA and such things will proceed; technological possibilities will create momentum toward greater cultural interaction; etc, and in the farther future, something more EU-style may happen.
I hope, BTW, that the implications of a movement toward federation in South Asia, however faint it currently seems – are not lost on the diaspora and those in it that argue for a South Asian diasporic identity, especially at SM. We see how meaningful such an identity is and can be – and we also see the reaction against it. Similar forces are (re-)aligning in South Asia, though things are understandably farther along in the diaspora.
I’d agree that Hanif’s translation is bad — and desingned to make Musharraf look as silly as possible. I thought the Musharraf’s Urdu was fine — he spoke like a normal person, not a newscaster on PTV.
But Hanif’s next book is apprently called “A Case of Exploding Mangos”. The guy clearly isn’t trustworthy.
chachaji, I keed, I keed.
I remember hearing that the first time I heard the speech and noting how awkward it was – so I can see how Haneef might have transposed it to extremism becoming extreme – though in my mind the problem was with the first part rather than the second. (If that makes any sense.) I mean that the phrase “intehapasandi” was rendered meaningless and ridiculous when combined with “inteha par pahunch gayi.” Or rather that the combination pointed out how shallow and unspecific the phrase was to begin with.
Anyway, it is odd that Haneef manages to misquote this into a clearly ridiculous sounding mixed-language sentence. The rest of the misquoting itself is pretty egregious, too, considering this is something fully available on the internet. And all – apparently – just to support his drunk-uncle image. Having been horribly misquoted by South Asian journalists myself, it’s nice to see one of them called out on it. Good job, chachaji.
Amit, that was really uncalled for.
Anyway, it’s good to know Justice Bhagwan Das wasn’t alone on Diwali and some people paid him a visit. Though, it is really exceptional for a Hindu to rise to such position in Pakistan but even some hard core Mullahas supported his appointment. That was really something which tells me there is still some hope.
Yup. Sorry about that.
chachaji’s quotes and translations (#12) are far more accurate. Don’t know what Haneef was smoking. The speech was not a rhetorical achievement, but it was effective in that it seemed heartfelt. Right now is the closest I have come to supporting Musharraf ;).
Neena, thank you for posting the news item on the Pakistani citizens who visited Justice Bhagwandas on Diwali. I heard the news on BBC but couldn’t find it on the web. BBC’s take on it was ‘Diwali is celebrated by Muslims in Islamabad, too!’.
There is also good news from the LOC/Border – it is the 4th consecutive Diwali that has passed without any cross-border gunfire of any sort. BSF and Pakistan Rangers contingents have exchanged sweets and commanders have shaken hands. The same thing also happened on Id last month.
what are the odds that mushy was complicit in the bhutto bomb blast in karachi last month? not that he had it organized or planned, but was less than diligent in taking the appropriate precautions to prevent it. if the explosion had got bhutto, that would’ve immediately eliminated the immediate need for elections, and even now that it hasn’t, it is being used to drum up a scare about deteriorating law and order in pakistan. it’s a win-win for him.
Dravidian Lurker,
This is an interesting take but he isn’t responsible though there is likely greater chance of his close alies involvement. One of which is Gen. Zia’s son Ijaz ul Haq who has a fascination with suicide bombing for the cause of Islam and another is Chaudry Shujaat (long time family feud going between Benazir and him) and angry members of ISI.
In his early tenure he really did some good work and brought moderation and free media to Pakistan but things are now getting out of his hands. I don’t blame him for his shotcomings he is just a poor Dictator who wants to hang on to power no matter what ;).
Dravidian lurker, Fair enough, but on the other hand, what is your assumed local baseline level of gov’t-level execution of (socially) desired tasks? If you assume that the “diligent” taking of “appropriate” steps to prevent bad outcomes is routine, then I fear nearly everything in Pakistan may start to seem like complicity in some sort of conspiracy theory. Or, more succinctly, “ki dekh da payeh?”
neera, i certainly think that nawaz sharif was taking pakistan in a dangerous direction with his inefficiency and support of the mullahs, and mushy probably helped by ending that, but as you said “he is just a poor dictator who wants to hang on to power no matter what” 🙂
rob, surely you appreciate the difference between “they tried their darndest and failed” and “they didn’t bother trying hard enough”?
Dravidian Lurker, I’m just trying to warn against feeling too good about bashing Pakistan from the perspective of an unrealistically rosy baseline–not that I think you’re doing that, not at all–just warning the readers against that sort of over-reading of the way the discussion has gone–kudos to the discussion, I just had the sense it could be over-read that way.
Mais oui!!, but I think that a particular scenario could look very different in terms of “tried hardest and failed” or “didn’t try,” depending on your baseline assumptions about what’s realistically possible, which is largely (from the personal perspective) institutional, so again, we need to know a lot more about Pakistan before claiming Mushy is behind the bombs–note that I say this as a person who disavows “cultural relativism” (in the sense that the latter holds that “one culture is no better than another”–my point goes to the to me true proposition that one person working in even a “lesser” culture can’t be held to unrealistically high expectations) and I am cert. not a person that carries a torch for any sort of “Islamism,” etc. (I am Hindu and parents from Delhi, so we understand Islam, and have very different reactions/views to its different strands).
WHAT?? i thought dictatorship improved efficiency? didn’t the trains run on time under mussolini?
41 dravidian lurker
Yeah, that’s why I’m ultimately a quietist–I prefer a nice dinner out, which might include steak or lobster (I only stay veg. at home) to political fights–but–this Pakistan thing (loose nukers, really–it’s not much more than an irritant otherwise–still, that does kill people on both sides, for no reason-not like the Pakistani irreulars are going to change the border) frightens me deeply–I am only being honest to say that the Israeli lobby is trying to suck me in, and that I feel a natural affinity for it, given our (Jewish, Hindu) mutual sense of predation/victimisation from Central Asia/Arabian Penninsula–but, I pride myself on saying “not so fast”–the syncreticism in India/South Asia has been far more succesful than in the Levant–so, I am OK with any Muslim that accepts Hindus as legitimate people–sadly, this is small group outside of South Asian Muslims (maybe, again, my impression is wrong–probably my point is more about Arabs than Indonesians, for example).
rob, I’m curious – do you consider yourself Hindu on a religious basis or on a cultural/ethnic/my family is Hindu basis?
43 · nala rob, I’m curious – do you consider yourself Hindu on a religious basis or on a cultural/ethnic/my family is Hindu basis?
Much more the latter, though to be honest I’m not, in terms of the former (being Hindu or not on a religous basis) saying “no”–I have personal practices far more than “zero,”, but–to give a fair answer to your fair question, much more the latter–esp. cultural/my family (not so much ethnic–not sure what that would mean, given my family’s narrow view of such stuff).
some pakistani people went to thank mr.bhagwandas for his stand against the govt. by celebrating diwali at his home:
pictures of ppl celebrating diwali with mr.bhagwandas
also if you guys watch geo or other pakistani news channels you will see hindues openly celebrated diwali in khi and other cities. no muslim bajrangi went their to gutt pregnant women open because they were hindu
Reason, give me a break. Hindus and Sikhs are 1 percent of Pakistans population. Don’t try to play yourself off as tolerant.
reason (45):
I don’t even know what that means. Mushie, is that you? You’re commenting on the Mutiny now, and ignoring the mutiny at home? For shame! Call Benazir up, and get some sleep.