You Got it Wrong Mr.Mush

Mr.Musharraf, as we are learning to call him after he jettisoned, rather, mournfully relinquished, his army uniform, had got things absolutely wrong. He introduced Emergency, proposed the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO), expelled the Supreme Court Chief Justice Ifthikar Choudhary, curtailed the human rights of the population and proclaimed himself as the sole ruler of the Muslim country. All these factors have only resulted in reducing his popularity among the masses and his credibility in the eyes of the international community. Again, speaking about his popularity, it was never quite high for him to get worried about any diminution of it, but it had got still worse and reached a level where there had been wide spread mass protest against his autocratic rule with the emergency in place.

If one would contemplate the places where Mr.Mush had gone wrong - for that matter a very close perusal of the facts is not needed, instead anyone with a little of common sense can hardly miss his failure points - it all started with his declaration of Emergency on November. This was certainly a move to counter any decision the Supreme Court might had taken against his re-election on October. With the declaration of emergency he has defeated every possible move of his critics to rule him out of his incumbent position as the Head of the State. One of the most unpopular decision he had taken is the introduction of Provisional Constitution where by curtailing the legal human rights of the people and this came under a lot of criticism from inside and outside the country. He banned protests against him, banned all private television channels, arrested people who were protesting against him, put lawyers under house arrest, anointed hand picked people as judges in the Supreme Court and so on.

Now Mr.Musharraf is speaking about lifting the Emergency and conducting "free and fair" elections. With the absence of an autonomous election commission and with the judiciary playing to the tunes of Mr.Musharraf, one could hardly expect a fair and transparent election. There are scepticism that President Musharraf would dare to do pre-election and post-election rigging to manipulate the election result to suit him and would baptize the political party that supports him , the PML(Q) to reign at the Parliament. But the pro-Musharraf administration is saying that they have done everything possible to conduct a free and fair election with election observers from different countries already present there at Pakistan.

The most significant issue about the present situation there at Pakistan is the absence of human rights. There is no law and order, there is no proper judicial system to take care of the legal rights of the people and there is no environment for the freedom of speech and expression. The international community is not doing enough to change this situation. The human rights groups in Pakistan are fighting hard to reclaim their lost right, they should be given moral support by all countries who believe in freedom and democracy, international human rights agencies should pressurize the international community to act in favor of bringing normalcy back in Pakistan, there should be enough mechanism in place to showcase the human rights activism happening in Pakistan to the international community where by this struggle can increase the confidence of all human rights activists across the world and the international agencies working on human rights viz. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, OHCHR etc. should come forward to take up this issue to the world stage.

There are a lot of things to be done to bring down the arrogant dictator Mr.Mush from his position as the President of Pakistan and also a lot of things to be done to bring back democracy in that country. Pakistanis should see this as an golden opportunity to wipe off Pakistan military's age old demeanor of usurping power from the democratically elected government. Of course one can't help but think that the end is near for Mr.Musharraf's dream run as the Chief Executive of his country and he has himself to blame for that because he always got everything absolutely wrong.