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).
