A Fauji & His Days in Pakistan – Blogging Over His Dead Body

"In the beginning was the corpse: lifeless matter from which a human had fled." Thus begins Thomas W. Laqueur’s remarkable book, "The Work of the Dead," that traces humankind's fascination with mortal remains.

Pervez Musharraf had died last Sunday, and while the verdict of history remains reserved, Pakistan remains divided over this Delhi-born man who served as army chief for nearly nine years and then became the 10th president of Pakistan.

His mortal remains were a subject of some debate in Pakistan even when he was alive, a distinction few could claim!

In the December of 2019 came the real icy cold judgement of a three-member special court bench that had tried Musharraf in absentia: the law enforcement agencies of Pakistan must do everything in their power to catch this man and hang him by his neck "till he dies on each count as per charge."

How, pray, were they to hang the man to ensure he "dies on each count" was not even the question debated in Pakistan. The judgement had triggered a more pressing debate about what to do if the man could not be caught and hanged and, instead, were to die a natural death before law's long arm reached his neck?

Peshawar High Court Chief Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth's 167-page detailed judgement, was very clear on that point: "If found dead, his corpse be dragged to the D-Chowk, Islamabad, Pakistan and be hanged for three days," he wrote.

The army was angry, the political class was divided; army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa and premier Prime Minister Imran Khan huddled in a room; and prime time news tv debates exploded in rage.

Chief Justice of Pakistan Asif Saeed Khosa, who was on the verge of retirement, had said just days earlier that the country's judiciary in the post-Musharraf era itself had convicted one prime minister (Yousuf Raza Gilani) and had disqualified another (Nawaz Sharif). Clearly, it should have been seen par for the course if it decided to hang the corpse of a former army chief and president in the town square.

Pervez Musharraf's mortal remains continued to be a story.

On Monday, February 6, Musharraf's dead, stiff, cold body landed at the Karachi airport in a special aircraft, paid for by the UAE. In tow was his family. Civic reception of the mortal remains was too muted, almost absent. At one of Pakistan's most sedate talk tv platforms, Zara Hat Kay of Dawn News, Wasatullah Khan of BBC Urdu fame, noted that the mortal remains of last three dictators – Ayub, Yahya, Zia – were wrapped in the country's national flag but still wondered if Musharraf's will also be covered by the same green cloth marked by a white crescent in the centre and a five-pointed white heraldic star. (https://youtu.be/_TODPMNmIRM?t=1519)

Wasatullah Khan is a triply-confirmed cynic, as anyone who has read his 2010 flood reportage, "Sailab Diaries," or follows him through his talk-show Zara Hat Kay, knows. In his defence, for a country that has seen more than its share of fauji days, it is natural for even well-read Pakistanis to invariably turn into undeclared disciples of Diogenes, the virtual Greek god of Cynicism.

But when it came to mortal remains, Pakistanis refuse to take the Diogenes' approach who had asked that his mortal remains be thrown over the city wall for wild animals to feast on his body. All he wanted was a stick to chase away those animals.

I am sure they planned to bury Musharraf's stick alongside his remains, but still wouldn't have taken kindly to Diogenes' advice; they lack the philosophical clarity of the Greek philosopher who, when asked what use the stick would be if he were dead, explained in terms that even the really dumb boot-lovers could not miss.

Meanwhile, this fauji's last days in Pakistan kept the country in turmoil — over his mortal remains.

It was natural because the country had not forgotten the image of the dead body of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto lying on a cot, surrounded by five members of his family at the Bhutto family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, in Larkana District of Sindh. Gen Zia-ul-Haq had hanged him, snubbing appeals of mercy from Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, not to count Indira Gandhi's or Morarji Desai's. It was a burial most hurried, and often reminds me of Antigone throwing a fistful at her brother's mortal remains. (The massive shrine you now see around the graves of Zulfikar and his daughter Benazir is a later development.)

When Benazir was blown to smithereens in 2007 on Musharraf’s watch, all evidence, including probably pieces of her flesh, was washed away with high pressure water hose pipes within four hours of the explosion at the Liaqat National Bagh, an area ironically named after a leader because he was assassinated there in 1951.

When Nawaz Sharif's and Shahbaz Sharif's father died, Perzez Elahi's government in Punjab refused to hand over the coffin that had reached Karachi from Jeddah. Instead, it was loaded on to a military helicopter that directly landed at Sharifs' Raiwind Estate, thus thwarting the next of kin's plans to first take the body to Data Darbar in Lahore. Neither Nawaz nor Shahbaz could attend the funeral of their father.

But how mortal remains of Akbar Bugti, Pakistan's charismatic Baloch politician and militia leader killed at Musharraf's instance and by his regime, were treated has no parallel in contemporary political history: his body was put in a plywood box, sealed with two padlocks dangling by the side, and was buried by army jawans. No one ever saw the dead Bugti's face.

In case of Musharraf, far from his dead body hanging at Islamabad's D-chowk for three days, three former army chiefs and the incumbent Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff Committee were in attendance, but not before the mortal remains of this self-proclaimed Kemal Atatürk of Pakistan had become the subject of deep divisions, exposing the Pakistani politics' faultlines.

On Monday, the day a dead Musharraf had landed in Karachi, Pakistan's Senate exploded over whether it should offer prayers for the soul of former military ruler. The treasury benches opposed it, Imran Khan's PTI wanted to pray while Zardari-Bhutto's PPP condemned the man who undermined the country's Constitution.

As Senate chairman Sadiq Sanjrani asked a senator to offer prayers for Musharraf, Mushtaq Ahmad said there can't be any pleading with Allah for “a certified traitor who broke the Constitution twice and was responsible for conflagration in Balocistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa."

Senator Moula Bux Chandio PPP went a step further and said those wanting to pray for Musharraf were also traitors.

In an enchanting chat with senior Pakistan reporters Azaz Syed and Umar Cheema, the much respected journalist Matiullah Jan, describing the day inside the Pakistan TV studios when the country passed into another spell of fauji days on October 12, 1999, refused to forgive Musharraf ever. (https://youtu.be/2V-Bb8ARyzw?t=1449)

The powerful army might have ensured a peaceful burial for Pervez Musharaff, but it was no match for the outpouring of grief seen in Pakistan after the assassinations of Zulfikar or Benazir Bhutto.

Unfortunately, the women of Pakistan didn't get to say much about this man, labelled as liberal and moderate, who once told the Washington Post in New York that Pakistani women get themselves raped as a money-making concern. "A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped,” President Musharraf said in that interview which he later denied and then suffered further ignominy because WaPo reporter Glenn Kessler had it all on tape.

The incident reminded many of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's disastrous interview with one of the most famous journalists of the twentieth century, Oriana Fallaci, who had faithfully reported Bhutto's disparaging remarks about Indira Gandhi at a time when he was trying to persuade her to return the 90,000 Pakistani officers and soldiers India was holding as prisoners of war.

Later, Bhutto sent emissaries in search of Fallaci, finally catching up with her in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, to convince her to publicly say that she had made up those comments. Instead, she cabled the entire interview, including hitherto unpublished further damaging remarks Bhutto had made, to Indira Gandhi. It's a wonder how Bhutto could slip so badly while talking to a woman who had succeeded in getting Henry Kissinger to call Vietnam a "useless war" and describe himself as "a cowboy." For decades, Kissinger called the Fallaci interview "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with the press." (You can read Oriana Fallaci's fascinating interviews in this book.)

Musharaff, having messed up with his comments on rape and women, decided to set things right by messing them up further and claiming he never said what he said. It only elicited an editorial from The Washington Post: “When Gen. Musharraf's statement provoked an uproar, he responded with another lie: He claimed that he had never made it. In fact, a recording of him speaking is available on The Post's Web site, washingtonpost.com. His words are quite clear. "These are not my words, and I would go to the extent of saying I am not so silly and stupid to make comments of this sort," the general said. Well, yes, he is.”

In the same interview in which he made disparaging remarks about women and rape, Pervez Musharraf thought he had a 56 inch chest and bloated beyond his auqat: “Leave the developing world aside; I think we are better than all of them. Bring the developed world and let us compare Pakistan’s record, under me, a uniformed man, with many of the developed countries. I challenge that we will be better off.”

That was exactly the week when Pakistani newspapers were rife with news about people dying from drinking contaminated water.

When alive, he failed to, but could a dead Musharraf see the irony between his claims and the state of Pakistan?

Pervez Musharraf's mortal remains have left behind the lasting image of a funeral sans people where only boots offered a salute and the country, priding itself for being the sole nuclear power of the Islamic world, is busy discussing the rate of flour per kilograms and the radius of a chapati and its government-ordained rate with members of parliament actually bringing a chapati to the house to demonstrate how the cost of stuffing one's stomach has gone beyond even the reach of the middle class!

I felt like asking Pervez Musharraf's dead body if he would have wanted a comparison with the developing/developed world, but since that was not possible, I could only have turned to John Troyer. Troyer has dealt with dead bodies as director of the University of Bath's Centre for Death and as the son of a funeral director. His fascinating book, "Technologies of the Human Corpse," explains this hybrid response of the living to the dead: what we do with the mortal remains is always a very political choice.

If his book taught me one thing, it is that one should do right when one is alive. That's the only way to make sure you care as little about your mortal remains as Diogenes, and others care about your mortal remains as much as Antigone did. Any other way of fighting death is a bad idea. Death wins. Death always wins. And Diogenes was joking. You can’t use a stick, not even when you were a general.

Mortal remains are very political: One of the police officers who beat and kill Tyre Nichols last month during a traffic violation stop in Memphis, snapped a picture of his bloody body after the beating and texted it to others — a kind of big-game-kill perversity. This week, the president of the United States was addressing Nichols’ parents in the State of the Union address. As I said, mortal remains can be immortal. You only have to bring your politics to it.

The Prophet (PBUH) was clear, the Sunnah tells us: “When you see a funeral procession, you should stand up, and whoever accompanies it should not sit till the coffin is put down.” Pakistan did not stand up for a dead Pervez Musharraf. The fauji’s days ended in ignominy, surrounded by boots. However, I still must end it like Antigone: Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji ‘ un!