Military rulers are finally dumped into landfill of history
After their fall from power military rulers find it difficult to reconcile with reality. While in power, they are told by the flatterers around them, that they are immensely popular. They remain wedded to the illusion for quite some time after leaving office. Some like Pervez Musharraf fail to come to grips with the reality for years.
Till early 2013 Musharraf believed the he enjoyed widespread support. The perception was strengthened by hundreds of thousands of “likes” on his Facebook page. He decided to return to contest the upcoming elections. The cold reception he got at the airport, followed by three years of detention and court appearances with no public protests against the treatment disabused him of the notion of popularity. Frustrated and frightened he flew out of the country on the pretext of getting medical treatment, subsequently jumping the bail and being declared an absconder.
Musharraf still retains the illusion that he can come to power through manoeuvring. For some time after his escapade he played with the idea of forming a third force offering to lead it himself. He tried to sell the idea through TV talks and telephone calls to a number of political leaders but none was willing to join hands with a rootless and widely disliked former dictator. Frustrated, he told BBC Urdu early this month that civilian governments have always ruined the country while military rulers had made it prosper. He justified military coups and the violation of the constitution to ‘save the people’.
Lacking the courage to return to Pakistan and face the cases Musharraf decided to approach the Pakistani community abroad. The purpose now was to keep a presence at least in the media. Last Saturday at a “Dialogue for Peace” in Oslo the audience protested against allowing a military ruler who was under trial for murder to speak at the Nobel Peace Prize Centre. The event had to be cancelled midway before Musharraf could complete his speech. Another proposed address at SOAS University London had to be cancelled due to opposition from the University students. The intelligentsia in the west has little patience for former military dictators.