President General Pervez Musharraf on December 30, 2004, spoke to a listening nation: "Pakistan has never had real democracy in more than fifty years." This, of course, is absolutely correct as it has forever been 'grab as grab can'.
He continued: "The Constitution of Pakistan allows me to retain both offices until 2007. And I shall never violate the Constitution." His inner voice surely told him otherwise - that he had amended the sacred document and can and will do so again, and will strictly abide by all amendments.
"I know that the uniform is a non-issue for the people of Pakistan," he announced. This cannot be denied. He can dress like Mahatma Gandhi provided he can also provide Gandhi's quality of leadership and deliver on his promises.
The general touched on ideology: "What kind of ideology should be in place in Pakistan? An ideology of ignorance, backwardness, a retrogressive ideology given in the name of Islam? ....... The answer is clear. Pakistan wants a system with the ideology of Allama Iqbal and the vision of the Quaid-i-Azam." Good. We could do with a bit of such a system. Both men lived and enjoyed their lives to the full. Both were men liberal in thought and in deed.
The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, a great and good monarch for sixty long years, was the man who first said 'Apres moi, le deluge (after me the deluge).' General Charles de Gaulle echoed the same phrase a couple of centuries later and Musharraf, by implication, has more or less said the same thing. He may like to ponder a saying attributed to de Gaulle : 'The graveyards of the world are full of indispensable men.'
Now that our general has fully firmed up his position, he will become even more of a focus for sycophancy. Hopefully, he will be able to keep at bay a lot of the more dangerous in the hordes of tufthunters who will butter him up. Can someone persuade him to resist all attempts made to get him to accept an honorary doctorate, which has of late become quite the fashion amongst the high and mighty of the land? We are regaled frequently with comical photographs in the press showing various luminaries decked out in fancy dress - colourful gowns and skew-whiff mortar boards - being presented with degrees by universities which are not entitled to award any such honours. Musharraf can and will wear his army uniform but let him not be persuaded into masquerading as an academic.One of his predecessors fell into the honorary doctorate trap and his men made a mess of it. A bunch of civil servants (known then as the Bunglers of Bangkok) thought they would serve Master General President Ziaul Haq and earn themselves kudos by manipulating for him an honorary doctorate. They chose Bangkok as the place and Zia's state visit to Thailand as the occasion.
Thammasat, the University of Moral and Political Sciences of Thailand, for reasons it did not have to explain, when asked refused to confer a doctorate on Zia. As a sop, the smaller Chulalangkorn University was reportedly forced to oblige (by the hosts obviously who must have had a good laugh). The programming bureaucrats and diplomats of both countries should have been taken to task and made answerable for this preventable disfavour done to our head of state, and thus to the state, and thus to its people.
Should those shining civil servants not have done their homework? Had they done a bit of research they would have found that the Thai universities had in the past even rebuffed their own prime minister, Prem Tinsulanond. And the Pakistani lot should at least have recalled to mind how Oxford reacted when asked to confer an honorary doctorate on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan. Keeping in mind Bhutto's standards of democracy, the university could find no justifiable 'causa' for conferring upon him a doctorate of his asking (it later did the same to Margaret Thatcher).
Our dictators preceding Bhutto fared better. Rangeela Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan (1969-71), a lover of life and all that it had to offer, had neither the time nor the inclination for pretentiousness. Ayub Khan (1958-69) successfully managed to obtain a doctorate from the Campus at Kandy. Iskander Mirza (1955-58) felt secure with his rank of major-general and rested content with the laurels he had earned early in life on the Frontier when he was a much-mentioned in dispatches 'politicaal'.
Ghulam Mohammad (1951-55) was an accountant steeped in finances, and disinterested in the virtues - real or imaginary - of scholarship. Khwaja Nazimuddin (1948-51), rotund in figure but straight as a dye morally and materially, was a Cambridge man who had renounced his knighthood bestowed by the British monarch. He had no need to prove himself.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1947-48), the first and most able, the best of the lot, whose teachings and examples General Musharraf wishes us to emulate, sent this reply on October 4 1942 to a letter received from Vice-Chancellor Ziauddin of Aligarh : "While I appreciate very much indeed the spirit which has actuated the court to take this decision [conferment of an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws] I have, most reluctantly, to say that I have lived as plain Mr Jinnah and I hope to die as plain Mr Jinnah. I am very much averse to any title or honours and I will be more than happy if there was no prefix to my name."
Last week we saw a photograph of a begowned and bemortarboarded governor of Sindh presenting an equally begowned and bemortarboaded bewildered looking Abdul Sattar Edhi with an honorary doctorate from Greenwich University. Why ridicule this good man? He is not to know that Professor Doctor Ata-ur-Rahman, chief of the Higher Education Commission, has categorized this university as a 'Category-C' institution which does not meet the requirements of the HEC.
Why this yearning for the mortar board and gown? Could it be insecurity? Or an inferiority complex? Or what?
Q. Isa Daudpota of Comstech recently wrote on 'Fake degrees on sale'. A question had arisen about the degrees held by a former captain of the Pakistan army, U.A.G. Isani, now vice-chancellor of the Quaid-i-Azam University. Poor old Daudpota immediately lost his job.
The old saying still holds true : 'Allah meherban to gadha pehlwan.'