PUSHED into the background — but only just — by other events, the political status of the Musharraf trial is difficult to know at the moment. Is the government willing to push ahead with a trial or will it bow to the (il)logic of civil-military relations and allow Pervez Musharraf to leave the country? Meanwhile, the defence team of the former dictator is doing its best to drum up scandal and headlines in the likely hope that it will build further pressure on the government. The latest move is to try and build some hype around a so-called abettors’ list, essentially the individuals in the military and the government who allegedly advised Mr Musharraf to impose the November 2007 Emergency. There are two aspects here worth commenting on. First, whether or not there were abettors would hardly make a difference to the trial that Mr Musharraf faces. Ultimately, it was the former military strongman who signed on the dotted line of the Emergency order — a patently illegal move, the illegality of which in no way is diminished whether he acted alone or on the advice of others. The defence team appears to be simply trying to turn up the political temperature by dragging other then-senior military figures into the picture in the hope that it will cause the government to back down from insisting on a Musharraf trial.

Second, setting aside the obvious motives of the defence team in repeatedly bringing up the issue of those who allegedly collaborated with Mr Musharraf, there is a real and important issue here too: for all the emphasis on the dictator himself, the reality is that military rule is only possible because of the many senior politicians, judges, bureaucrats and other public officials who collaborate with dictatorships. Go back to the original sin, ie October 1999. From the very fact that the coup was launched while then Gen Musharraf was still in the air, to all the constitutional and legal contortions necessary to validate the takeover, to the technocrats and politicians who rushed to Mr Musharraf’s side to help him establish his rule — virtually everything that took place required the dictator to rely on aiders and abettors who helped build the lie of constitutional, political and electoral legitimacy. Surely, if the door to dictatorship is to remain shut forever, those who helped build and sustain dictatorships should also be held to account.

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2014