Salmaan Taseer: Icon of pluralism

By Farahnaz Ispahani

On January 4, 2011, Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer was brutally assassinated by one of his own guards, a zealot named Mumtaz Qadri, while the rest of his security detail stood and watched. Taseer was a progressive politician and self-made business tycoon, who espoused and lived by the best liberal traditions of equality and justice for all Pakistani citizens, including the rights of religious minorities. Qadri believed that Taseer was not a good Muslim because of his advocacy on behalf of poor victims of Pakistan’s unjust blasphemy laws.

The assassin’s view of Taseer was shaped by negative media campaigns on TV by leading anchors on prime time shows – a reflection of the exploitation of religious sentiment for political and commercial purposes in our country. An erroneous belief generated by false propaganda was enough for Qadri to take an innocent life. Unfortunately, the world later saw the murderer garlanded, feted and his virtues extolled; Pakistan lost another one of its handful of great and visionary leaders.

Taseer was born in Simla, British India. His father, Muhammad Din 'M D' Taseer, obtained his PhD in England and was a close friend of Pakistan’s great poet and intellectual Allama Iqbal. His mother, Bilqis Christobel Taseer, was English by birth and the sister of Alys Faiz. Mrs Faiz was herself a writer and poet and her husband Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan’s greatest political poet who suffered imprisonment and exile from his beloved homeland for his strong views against injustice and dictatorship.

Salmaan Taseer was a man of strong views, deep friendships and disliked in equal parts by obscurantists and those whose business fortunes had been made through political patronage. And, liked and deeply respected by the principled and those who also espoused and lived by liberal values. His own reputation in the business world as a self-made and honest entrepreneur was without question. Neither friend nor foe could deny his fierce nationalism and his political and personal courage.

Mere hours before his assassination, he tweeted a couplet from an Urdu poem by Shakeel Badayuni:
“My resolve is so strong that I do not fear the flames from without, I fear only the radiance of the flowers, that it might burn my garden down.”

Inspired as a young student in the 1960s by the populist socialism of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he was jailed and tortured several times under the brutal dictatorial regime of General Muhammad Ziaul Haq. Appointed Governor of Punjab in 2008 by the coalition government led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) that Bhutto founded, he spoke out against the Taliban and other Islamist militants, accusing opposition parties of failing to stand up to religious extremism.

Salmaan Taseer laid down his life for his unwavering principles, emphatically raising his voice against oppression and religious intolerance. His support for a poor, unlettered Asia Noreen jailed on false accusations of blasphemy was a step no other Muslim politician was willing to take at the time. A Twitter post by him reflected his beliefs: “My observation on minorities: A man/nation is judged by how they support those weaker than them not how they lean on those stronger.”

I was at Rawalpindi General Hospital when Shaheed Benazir Bhutto, my mentor, my friend and the woman I most admired passed away. The attacks on her by the jihadis she had fought throughout her life finally achieved their goal and robbed Pakistan of a mature, experienced leader. I was also there at the Polyclinic Hospital in Islamabad with fellow parliamentarian Rukhsana Bangash when our Governor and friend Salmaan Taseer’s bullet-riddled corpse was brought in.

These two events shook me to the core but much more importantly, they robbed the country of two brave leaders committed to democracy, pluralism and the rights of women and minorities. Taseer's assassination was aimed at creating an environment of fear and lawlessness and preventing others from speaking out as he did. And it succeeded.

Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah's vision for Pakistan was of a modern Muslim country where each and every citizen irrespective of religion, race or sex had equal rights. Unfortunately, we are still very far from that vision today. Anti-democratic forces and their jihadi offshoots have eliminated every leader and intellectual who has attempted to revive the Quaid's vision.

Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto attempted to fulfil the Quaid's vision but was rewarded by judicial murder. Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto followed in the path of the Quaid and her father. Salmaan Taseer too was targeted because of his advocacy of a pluralist Pakistan where minorities could live without discrimination on religious grounds. Instead of stopping Jihadi groups and brainwashed civilians like Qadri acting with impunity, the Pakistani state has allowed them a free hand for far too long.

The loss of the lives of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto and Shaheed Salmaan Taseer did not result in lessons being learnt. When on December 16 last year, nine members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacked the Army Public School/College in Peshawar, killing 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren, Pakistanis expressed shock and horror. But this tragedy was the result of General Ziaul Haq’s poisonous legacy of religious extremism, which Benazir Bhutto and Salmaan Taseer had consistently opposed.

This may be the time to heed Shaheed Salmaan Taseer’s call for building a tolerant Pakistan that shuns religious extremism instead of describing it as integral to the nation’s founding ideology. Unless we end the marginalization of liberal voices in our country, we will not only continue to lose progressive leaders like Taseer, the flood of zealotry will also continue to drown our children as was witnessed in the Peshawar school tragedy.