Periscope on Pakistan

A speech best left undeliveredMilitary writing, as taught in the academies, puts great store by precision. In the issuance of military ord...

A speech best left undelivered
Military writing, as taught in the academies, puts great store by precision. In the issuance of military orders there is no place for waffle. The address by General Musharraf on Wednesday evening was not a military order. Since it was being delivered by a military man the amount of unrelieved tedium was regrettable, to say the least. It was a speech which should not have been made.

It had me struggling with drowsiness in the first 15 minutes but since as a journalist (what things must be borne in this trade) I had to see it through to the end, I had to keep my eyes open but not without violence to my body clock. By the end of the General’s Phillipic, sleep had fled and for the rest of the night I was left tossing fitfully in bed, dreaming intermittently of the various circles of hell and suitable punishment for bad speech writers.

Unless a ruler is deliberately waging war on his own countrymen, and therefore deliberately keeping them in a state of confusion (a view of conflict to which General Zia was partial), there are two things he must not do: (1) even if he has no respect for the masses, which most rulers do not, he must not appear to insult the intelligence of his countrymen and, (2) unlike the emperor in the fable, he must not show himself before the people without his clothes.

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Unfortunately for the general, on this occasion he was guilty on both counts. Because the speech had been hyped up in advance by the general’s maladroit media managers and the finance minister (who has much to answer for in this connection), and in the event there was nothing in it, people were bound to feel cheated. The mandarin who came up with the description that the Chief Executive (CE), would be unfurling a `people-friendly’ economic package certainly deserves a prize for silliness if not a public whipping.

Raising public hopes unnecessarily and then dashing them to the ground is not very smart politics. But then who cares? Anyway, is the common Pakistani concerned about the sanctity of trademarks and intellectual property rights, two of the items the CE touched? If from the drab forest of verbiage laid before the nation’s expectant eyes all that had to emerge was the imposition of GST and agricultural tax and a Rs 100 raise to low-grade government employees, this task could well have been left to the finance minister.People can put up with a lot but, if they have a choice in the matter, they do not like being treated like morons.

But if the general’s potent sleeping pill did nothing else (apart, of course, from spreading its drowsy effects) it did end up exposing his government’s vulnerability: that it has no tricks up its sleeve, no rabbits to pull out of its hat. A string of pious homilies, a stream of good intentions, exclusive reliance on the future tense (the only tense Pakistani rulers are comfortable with), and, in the end, thick references to Islam, the last resort of all Pakistani leaders when they run out of ideas or are otherwise stumped for answers.