Parvez Musharraf: some personal recollections

These days I am spending a fair amount of time working on my memoirs which I hope to finish by the end of this year. In the draft under preparation, I am giving space to the interactions I have had with several world leaders with whom I came into contact during my long service at the World Bank. I was also in touch with a number of senior people in Pakistan to get their take on the situation in their country which helped me write several books I have published on Pakistan. I came to know well Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Ziaul Haq, Pervez Musharraf and Farooq Leghari. I am saddened by Musharraf’s death in Dubai on February 4, and thought I would share with my newspaper readers a couple of things that came up in our conversations.

When I retired from the World Bank in early 2000, I was invited by the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Institute for International Scholars (now Wilson Center) to spend some time there and write about Musharraf’s management of Pakistan’s economy and its political system. Such a book would have been a follow-up on what I had written on earlier periods of Pakistan’s history.

My first book on Pakistan was published in 1980 by Macmillan in London under the title Pakistan Under Bhutto. The second book was published by the US-based Westview Press and was co-authored with late Craig Baxter who had served in Pakistan as a member of the American Diplomatic Corps. I began work on the Musharraf book in 2002 and started my writing with several long conversations with the president who had taken over the country in a 1999 coup d’état. In a meeting in March 2006, he asked me whether my book would come out before his memoir was published. He told me that his book would be published in September 2006 under the title In the Line of Fire. He said he had been told that I had finished the manuscript.

I said that while the book I was working on had been done, I had shelved the manuscript for some rewriting since my impression of his years in office had changed from the very positive to somewhat negative. This surprised him. He said that I was an economist and not a political scientist and the performance of the government led by him in the field of economics was very good. I told him that that was not the case even though he and his prime minister had given several statements saying that they had set the economy on the course where the gross domestic product would increase by a sustainable rate of 7 to 8 per cent a year. That, I said, would not be the case.

I told him that I had studied economics at Oxford under Sir Roy Harrod who was the author of a simple formula for measuring sustainable rates of economic growth. The so-called Harrod-Domar model used what came to be known as the incremental capital output ratio, ICOR, which was based on the perceived efficiency of the economy. The ratio was generally between 3 and 4, with the more efficient economies at the lower end of the scale. When the rate of investment as the percentage of GDP was divided by ICOR, the result was the sustainable rate of growth. Pakistan’s ICOR at best was about 3.5 and the rate of investment was about 14 per cent of GDP. Dividing 14 by 3.5 yielded 4 was the sustainable rate of growth. It could be increased only by reducing the ICOR or increasing the rate of national investment. Neither had happened during the Musharraf period.

The second subject I discussed with Musharraf was relations with India. I told him that I well know Manmohan Singh who then was the prime minister of India. My first meeting with him after he had become the Indian prime minister was in New Delhi. He had invited me to his home and during the conversation he asked me if I knew Musharraf and if I did, I should pass on a message to him. “I have had two meetings with the Pakistani president when both of us were attending international meetings. In the first, I said to him that both of us were accidental leaders of our countries, and we should use that opportunity to work for the common citizens of our two nations.” His response was that that could only be done if “we solve the problem of Kashmir”. That would need adjustment in boundary lines. Singh was not prepared to go that route. “Not being an elected prime minister, I can’t change international boundaries,” he said. They had another conversation, this time on the sidelines of the United Nations annual conference. Singh once again asked Musharraf to work with him on moving forward the two countries for the economic and social welfare of all South Asian citizens. This time Musharraf had come prepared with a map that showed how the international boundaries of Kashmir could be redrawn. The Indian prime minister’s response was the same. “If you know Musharraf well, you could perhaps convince him that I am not in the position to play with boundaries. Short of that I am prepared to go along way.”

When I next met Musharraf, I gave him Manmohan Singh’s message. The president responded by saying that he had correctly conveyed to me the substance of their two meetings. “If you see him again, ask him why he doesn’t come over to Pakistan. I have invited him several times but he has embarrassed me by not making a Pakistan trip.” I conveyed that message to Singh and his response was the following: “He is a general in the army and all he needs to do is to tell his batman to pack his suitcase and call his plane to fly him to India. I am in charge of a democratic system that works on the basis of checks and balances. A trip to Pakistan would need the clearance of a number of ministries and departments. It takes time.” When I conveyed that response to Musharraf in my next meeting, he showed great exasperation. “Manmohan Singh is such a ‘babu’,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 13^th, 2023.

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