General Parvez Musharraf pulled-off a popular military coup against the second government of Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) in 1999.

Just like Ayub, Musharraf too came into power and received a hearty round of applause from a populace exhausted by the economic downturns, corruption and chaos of the 1990s in which the country’s two main political parties, the PPP and PML-N, constantly pulled the carpet under each other’s feet and at the same time wore themselves out by combating political intrigues whipped up by intelligence agencies and remnants of the Zia era in the ‘establishment.’

The Musharraf coup was not appreciated by Pakistan’s leading donor, the United States, and the General struggled to restore the country’s battered economy during the first two years of his regime. Posing himself as a religious moderate and a social liberal, Musharraf’s luck turned when he agreed to become a frontline ally of the US in its ‘war against terror’ in the aftermath 9/11.

Pakistan suddenly became the recipient of millions of dollars’ worth of military and financial aid from the US which Musharraf used to rebuild the country’s economy.

The economic boom masterminded by Musharraf’s second prime minister, Shaukat Aziz (a banker), and almost entirely based on various aspects of the post-Cold War ‘neo-con economics’, helped Musharraf avoid any serious resistance and the country remained largely peaceful till 2005.

However, joining the war on terror also meant Pakistan making some sudden U-turns regarding its policies related to religious militant groups who had been patronised by the state of Pakistan across the 1980s and 1990s to fight Pakistan’s proxy wars in Afghanistan and Indian-held Kashmir.

In 2002 Musharraf began to crack down on a number of extremist organisations but at the same time his regime maintained links with certain other militant outfits.

The crackdown, his decision to join the US war on terror, and him positioning his regime as liberal and inspired by ‘enlightened moderation’, triggered a backlash by extremist outfits that had been outlawed.

Thus began the trend of suicide bombings against government targets and foreign embassies that then escalated from 2007 onwards against civilians in markets, mosques, Sufi shrines and churches.

Political parties joined the fray against General Musharraf

Apart from facing the occasional terrorist attacks, the Musharraf regime managed to construct a feel-good environment in which the economy of the country’s urban areas thrived and no overt protest movement succeeded in taking hold. This also included Karachi’s return to peace and development after two decades of ethnic turmoil.

The euphoria lasted till about end-2005. Both the PPP and PML-N remained sidelined and Musharraf seemed to have been enjoying a continuous stretch of popularity.

Then in late 2006 Musharraf casually dismissed a controversial and ambitious Supreme Court judge, Iftikhar Chaudhry. The strings of private TV channels that had emerged since 2002 gave a sensational twist to the episode and drummed-up a narrative that saw Chaudhry defying ‘the illegitimate orders of a dictator.’

Lawyers poured out on the streets of Lahore and Islamabad and demanded that Chaudhry be restored. As the protests of the lawyers grew louder, they now also demanded that Musharraf resign and fresh elections held.

Seeing the protests as an opening and seeing the way agitation was covered by the electronic media, the PPP and PML-N too jumped in, as did smaller parties such as the JI and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI).

Musharraf was clearly taken aback by the commotion which was then followed by another crisis when radical clerics and their supporters from Islamabad’s Red Mosque began to abduct cops and women working at beauty parlours and attacking music shops.

After negotiations between the government and the clerics failed, Musharraf ordered the army to storm the mosque where the armed clerics were holed in.

The event was freely covered by the new TV channels which, in an exhibition of some of the most anarchic coverage of a sensitive issue, further compounded the tense situation.

Exaggerated figures of the civilians killed (especially women and children) were often quoted and the clerics were given more airtime to sound out their views than the government officials.

The confusion created by the media and the regime’s own weakness to counter the narrative that was being built eventually saw the emergence of an alliance of extremist militants who began to target public places supposedly to avenge ‘Musharraf’s Red Mosque massacre.’

It was at this point that the Lawyers’ Movement that had been initially started by progressive groups of lawyers began its shift to the right as parties like PML-N, PTI and JI began to dominate it. It was also believed that PML-N had begun to bankroll the movement.

The movement’s greatest presence was felt in urban Punjab and the NWFP. It was almost nowhere in Sindh and barely present in the province’s capital, Karachi.

This was the first major protest movement ever since 1968 and 1977 in which Punjab participated whole-heartedly. The province had largely remained quiet during the movements against Zia and many of Musharraf’s supporters in Sindh and Karachi suggested that Punjab only rises against non-Punjabi rulers.

Though some events may actually substantiate this, the recent rise of Imran Khan in the Punjab against Nawaz Sharif (a Punjabi) might be used to counter such a perception.

Unlike the movement against Ayub (which included the participation of the working classes and the peasants as well), the movement against Musharraf was more like the one against Bhutto in 1977 in which the majority of participants belonged to the urban middle and lower middle-classes.

This time however, these classes had actually prospered under Musharraf but after reaching certain limits of economic prosperity, these classes became the ‘blocked elite’ — and/or that portion of the robust urban classes who may have gained economic influence (through business-friendly economic policies) and social influence (through media outlets), find themselves blocked to also gain political influence by the traditional ruling elites.

The movement began to settle down when Musharraf grudgingly allowed the return of the country’s two main politicians, Benazir Bhutto (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif (PML-N).

Benazir unfortunately was assassinated in a bomb attack in December 2007 and her party’s charge was assumed by her husband Asif Ali Zardari.

Zardari and Nawaz led their parties to victory in the 2008 elections and both then squeezed Musharraf to resign as President and Army chief.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 31, 2014