The life of the late Pervez Musharaff, if you want to cut to the chase, unfolds in 1999 and ends in 2009. Those 10 frenzied years sum up his plain deceit as much as his unquestioned loyalty to the idea of Pakistan. It tells you of a deeply vengeful General who successfully hid the 'Mohajir' -- Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from India -- in him and fiddled with his country's institutions (while they burned?) and Constitution. He is also known for his self-orchestrated social liberalism thinly veiled in conservatism. Musharraf was as cunning as a fox and as defiant as a soldierly daredevil.
Years in the military and later in power unravelled General Musharraf as a clever tactician but a foolish strategist. He crafted Pakistan's Kargil strategy -- thinking he would cut the entire Indian Kashmir off and regain Siachen -- which India snatched from Pakistan in 1984. He forgot Indians would never allow it. India lost more than 700 of its brave men, but handed a bitter lesson. Pakistan lost everything, not only militarily but also politically and diplomatically. Worse, it lost the world's trust.
History has been unforgiving to modern dictators even before Musharraf fell ousted by his own country over the grim charge of treason. He ended up in a hospital far away from his promised land. The All Pakistan Muslim League that he founded in 2010 is dormant, reduced to the point of irrelevance in rancorous Pakistani politics.
Early life -- the elite class
Born on August 11, 1943 to Begum Zarin Musharraf and Syed Musharrafuddin in Delhi's Nehar Wali Haveli in the old city, Pervez Musharraf was hardly four years old when his Urdu-speaking parents shifted to Pakistan a few days before Independence. Musharraf was the second of three children, all boys. His elder brother, Javed Musharraf, is reportedly based in Rome and is an economist. Musharraf's younger brother, Naved, is an anaesthesiologist reportedly based in the US.
Musharraf was raised in Karachi and Istanbul, where his father was posted as a member of the diplomatic corps. He studied mathematics at the Forman Christian College in Lahore and Royal College of Defence Studies in the UK.
Commissioned in the Pakistan Army in 1964, Musharraf saw action during the Indo-Pak war in 1965 as Second Lieutenant. In the 1990s, Musharraf was promoted to Major General and assigned an infantry division. He later commanded the elite Special Services Group. Soon after, he also served as deputy military secretary and director general of military operations.
Sharif's man with a dagger in his hand
It was in 1998 that then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appointed him head of the armed forces as a four-star general. Within a year, General Mushrraf showed his true colours: he led the Kargil aggression that almost brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a full-fledged war in 1999. After months of contentious ties between Sharif and Musharraf, the former attempted to remove Musharraf as the army chief.
In retaliation, the army staged a coup in 1999, which allowed Musharraf to take over Pakistan as President in 2001. He subsequently placed Sharif under strict house arrest before launching official criminal proceedings against him.
Musharraf initially remained the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Chief of the Army Staff, relinquishing the former position upon confirmation of his presidency. However, he remained the Army Chief until retiring in 2007.
On November 3, 2007, he subverted and suspended the Constitution of Pakistan, sacking 15 Supreme Court judges and 56 judges of the provincial high courts while putting the then Chief Justice of Pakistan under house arrest. Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan.
On July 31, 2009, a 14-judge bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan declared Musharraf's action of declaring an emergency as illegal and unconstitutional. The year also saw Musharraf leaving Pakistan on a self-imposed exile to Dubai.
The General returned four years later in 2013 to fight elections, but soon found himself fighting an array of charges relating to his time in power. "There are a lot of challenges. There are security challenges, legal challenges, and political challenges. But I will face them," said Musharraf.
On December 12, 2013, the Sharif government submitted an 11-page complaint carrying five charges of high treason against Musharraf for his trial in the Special Court.
However, in March 2016, General Musharraf had already arrived in Dubai for medical treatment, days after the Supreme Court lifted a travel ban. His lawyers said he needed urgent spinal treatment unavailable in Pakistan.
"I am a commando and I love my homeland. I will come back in a few weeks or months," he said then. He never returned.
On December 17, 2019, the special Pakistan court found General Musharraf guilty of high treason under Article 6 of Pakistan's constitution -- for suspending the statute when he imposed a state of emergency in November 2007 -- and sentenced him to death.
The detailed verdict, with one dissenting judge and two judges in favor, refers to the repeated delays in the trial, saying Musharraf had "persistently and stubbornly strived ever since the commencement of this trial, to delay, retract and in fact evade it."
One paragraph in the judgment, authored by Justice Waqar Seth, is particularly gruesome: "We direct the law enforcement agencies to strive their level best to apprehend the fugitive/convict and to ensure that the punishment is inflicted as per law and if found dead, his corpse be dragged to the D-Chowk, Islamabad, Pakistan (a large public square near Pakistan's parliament, presidency, and Supreme Court) and be hanged for 03 days," as per a report by Madiha Afzal of The Brookings Institution, based in Washington DC. The death sentence was later annulled by the Lahore High Court.
Flashback: Agra Summit -- A grand dream and the cold reality
Mid-July 2001 saw him attempt a shot at greatness -- at least in the eye of his Pakistani citizens. As his nation's leader, Musharraf arrived in Agra with a clear idea about his objectives: use the "unstructured" agenda of the summit to persuade then Indian Prime Minister AB Vajpayee into conceding the primacy of Kashmir in Indo-Pak relations, which could then help him distinguish it from the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration.
India Today recalls: "When he received Vajpayee's invitation on May 23, Musharraf was just a Chief Executive desperate for legitimacy. He aimed to return to Pakistan not merely as the unchallenged President but a statesman -- the man who had broken a 53-year-old stalemate and come one step closer to avenging Pakistan's 1971 humiliation."
It was a pipedream that revealed much about the man and ended in crushing failure.
"On July 16, more than eight hours after his scheduled departure, it was a 'reflective' Musharraf who stepped into a waiting limousine at Jaypee Palace hotel to be driven to Agra airport. There were no public farewells, not even the customary handshake with Vajpayee for the cameras," the report went on to add,
The General wanted to make borders irrelevant and a Kashmir, sort of, belonging to both sides -- words that seem as romantic as the shayari of Omar Khayyam. The Indian side had seen Kargil and the dispossession of Sharif. Could anyone rely on Musharraf?
In 2010, BJP's Sushma Swaraj responded to Musharraf's allegation that a senior Indian official was responsible for the Agra summit failure. In a tweet, she said the Agra summit collapsed as Indian political leadership did not accept Musharraf's effort to bring Kashmir as 'core issue' while refusing to allow any mention of 'cross-border terrorism' in the agreed statement.
"Musharraf is wrong to blame Vivek Katju for the failure of Agra talks," Swaraj said. Katju, whom Musharraf was alluding to, was then Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs.
“The truth is that Musharraf wanted Kashmir as a 'core issue' and no mention of 'cross-border terrorism' in the agreed statement. This was not acceptable to the political leadership then. This is not acceptable even today," Swaraj said.
Assassination attempts
In his autobiography In the Line of Fire, Musharraf elaborates on his first experience with death, after falling off a mango tree when he was a child. The General, since the start of his political journey, survived five assassination attempts.
* In 2000, Kamran Atif, an alleged member of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Alami, tried to assassinate Musharraf. Atif was sentenced to death in 2006 by an anti-terrorism court.
* On December 14, 2003, Musharraf survived an assassination attempt when a powerful bomb went off minutes after his highly guarded convoy crossed a bridge in Rawalpindi; it was the third such attempt during his four-year rule. On December 25, 2003, two suicide bombers tried to assassinate Musharraf, but their car bombs failed to kill him; 16 others died instead.
Musharraf escaped with only a cracked windshield on his car.
* On July 6, 2007, there was another attempted assassination, when an unknown group fired a submachine gun at Musharraf’s plane as it took off from a runway in Rawalpindi. Security forces also recovered two anti-aircraft guns, from which no shots had been fired.
* On July 17, 2007, Pakistani police detained 39 people for plotting to assassinate Musharraf. The suspects were detained at an undisclosed location by Pakistani intelligence agencies.[
* In April 2014, Musharraf narrowly dodged an assassination attempt when a bomb exploded minutes before his convoy was due to pass by in Islamabad. No one was injured in the explosion’s wake, according to officials.
The General's wealth
In a TV interview in 2016, Musharraf said he was helped by the late Saudi King Abdullah after he left power and had no place of his own to live in the UK.
Musharraf said that he did not beg for money but King Abdullah gave him a huge amount though he did not disclose the exact amount, reported The News.
According to a once close aide of the former dictator, Musharraf was also helped by the rulers of another Arab state.
Earlier in 2012, The News reported that Musharraf's foreign accounts contained millions of dollars.
However, in his income tax returns to the Election Commission of Pakistan for 2013 general elections, Musharraf neither mentioned the "gift" from the Saudi ruler nor disclosed his wealth outside the country.
In 2012, The News reported that Musharraf made huge savings investments abroad to earn large profits. In just one Dubai-based online trading service - MMA - he had USD 1,600,000 (Rs 145 million) in 2011, it said.
Wealth or no wealth, the General was already a disgraced man at the time of his death in the eyes of his nation. That tellingly will remain the most deeply-etched truth in the epitaph of a man who in his own flawed way grasped for greatness.