My Father Died for Pakistan

[GUNNER]

My Father Died for Pakistan

By SHEHRBANO TASEER



TWENTY-SEVEN. That’s the number of bullets a police guard fired into my father before surrendering himself with a sinister smile to the policemen around him. Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was assassinated on Tuesday — my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday — outside a market near our family home in Islamabad.

The guard accused of the killing, Mumtaz Qadri, was assigned that morning to protect my father while he was in the federal capital. According to officials, around 4:15 p.m., as my father was about to step into his car after lunch, Mr. Qadri opened fire.

Mr. Qadri and his supporters may have felled a great oak that day, but they are sadly mistaken if they think they have succeeded in silencing my father’s voice or the voices of millions like him who believe in the secular vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

My father’s life was one of struggle. He was a self-made man, who made and lost and remade his fortune. He was among the first members of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the late 1960s. He was an intellectual, a newspaper publisher and a writer; he was jailed and tortured for his belief in democracy and freedom. The vile dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy.

One particularly brutal imprisonment was in a dungeon at Lahore Fort, this city’s Mughal-era citadel. My father was held in solitary confinement for months and was slipped a single meal of half a plate of stewed lentils each day. They told my mother, in her early 20s at the time, that he was dead. She never believed that.

Determined, she made friends with the kind man who used to sweep my father’s cell and asked him to pass a note to her husband. My father later told me he swallowed the note, fearing for the sweeper’s life. He scribbled back a reassuring message to my mother: “I’m not made from a wood that burns easily.” That is the kind of man my father was. He could not be broken.

He often quoted verse by his uncle Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Urdu’s greatest poets. “Even if you’ve got shackles on your feet, go. Be fearless and walk. Stand for your cause even if you are martyred,” wrote Faiz.

Especially as governor, my father was the first to speak up and stand beside those who had suffered, from the thousands of people displaced by the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 to the family of two teenage brothers who were lynched by a mob last August in Sialkot after a dispute at a cricket match.

After 86 members of the Ahmadi sect, considered blasphemous by fundamentalists, were murdered in attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore last May, to the great displeasure of the religious right my father visited the survivors in the hospital. When the floods devastated Pakistan last summer, he was on the go, rallying businessmen for aid, consoling the homeless and building shelters.

My father believed that the strict blasphemy laws instituted by General Zia have been frequently misused and ought to be changed.

His views were widely misrepresented to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet Mohammad. This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to happen. According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the blasphemy law was what drove Mr. Qadri to kill him.

There are those who say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others. This week two leading conservative politicians — former Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan — have taken the same position my father held on the blasphemy laws: they want amendments to prevent misuse.

To say that there was a security lapse on Tuesday is an understatement. My father was brutally gunned down by a man hired to protect him. Juvenal once asked, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” It is a question all Pakistanis should ask themselves today: If the extremists could get to the governor of the largest province, is anyone safe?

It may sound odd, but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands, improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential. He lived and died for Pakistan. To honor his memory, those who share that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice. We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.

Shehrbano Taseer is a reporter with Newsweek Pakistan.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/opinion/09taseer.html?_r=2&ref=global-home

 

[tvsram1992]

salaam
He didnt die , he is still in your hearts.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

Rest in peace.

 

[Fracker]

salaam
He didnt die , he is still in your hearts.

so this makes Qadri innocent

Not sure, what exactly Salman did for Pakistan? I know him as one among biggest comidian of Politics. Who was corrupt, who was against Punjab Developement being a Governer. Who was doing nothing from last 6 years other then coment passing. who came against court verdict, and rather then appealing, who chose side way.

He never died for pakistan, but his own steps.

& Welcome Miss Taseer into the politics

 

[GUNNER]

Not sure, what exactly Salman did for Pakistan?

Profile of Salman Taseer | The Pakistani Spectator

I know him as one among biggest comidian of Politics. Who was corrupt, who was against Punjab Developement being a Governer. Who was doing nothing from last 6 years other then coment passing.

I suppose you have proof of his corruption ?

 

[ice_man]

look let's leave qadri out of the equation for a minute! and look at salman taseer!!

While he was alive most pakistanis said this guy is "sharabi" "zani" & ayaash!! he did not symbolize pakistan in any way when he was alive.....however the biggest problem in south asia is kill someone and they become legends and all their BAD DEEDS go unnoticed! they are treated like saints........


let's not glorify taseer or qadri......qadri is insane!!!! and taseer was incorrect in his own ways.......but was killed for the wrong reasons! neither is a hero!!

 

[TROJAN.EXE]

blasphemy laws should be repealed.

 

[TROJAN.EXE]

May Salmaan Taseer rest in peace.

 

[Devil Soul]

i neva supported or liked ST(RIP), but frankly speaking i don't think he was corrupt , he was a successful businessman.

 

[Abu Basit]

died for Pakistan

 

[farhan_9909]

HE was a good person.

He knew it how much jazbati muslim are about their religion.

i think he was nt killed bt he himself done suicide

 

[Leviza]

well someone go and tell this to SHEHRBANO TASEER
This is what a common Pakistani facing these days and your father was enjoying the security gaurds....

But common Pakistanies are without any security gaurds.... they face this sort of killing every day and people like you father enjoys the security....

Now you have learned it the hard way how common Pakistani is feeling when they had a drone attack and all family dies....stats shows 19 out 20 people killed by drones are innocent... you can see the ratio SHEHRBANO TASEER........

no offence to SALMAN TASEER death but still these leaders need to open thier eyes now.. or it will go towards InQALAB....

 

[mehru]

Isn't it hard to write about your father's murder?
I really didn't expected Aatish to take notice of his father's death considering their strained relations but father is a father after all.

The killer of my father, Salman Taseer, was showered with rose petals by fanatics. How could they do this?'


By Aatish Taseer 7:30PM GMT 08 Jan 2011

I have recently flown home from North America. In airport after international airport, the world's papers carried front page images of my father's assassin.

A 26-year-old boy, with a beard, a forehead calloused from prayer, and the serene expression of a man assured of some higher reward. Last Tuesday, this boy, hardly older than my youngest brother whose 25th birthday it was that day, shot to death my father, the governor of Punjab, in a market in Islamabad.

My father had always taken pleasure in eluding his security, sometimes appearing without any at all in open-air restaurants with his family, but in this last instance it would not have mattered, for the boy who killed him was a member of his security detail.

It appears now that the plan to kill my father had been in his assassin's mind, even revealed to a few confidants, for many days before he carried the act to its fruition. And it is a great source of pain to me, among other things, that my father, always brazen and confident, had spent those last few hours in the company of men who kept a plan to kill him in their breasts.

But perhaps it could have been no other way, for my father would not only have not recognised his assassins, he would not have recognised the country that produced a boy like that. Pakistan was part of his faith, and one of the reasons for the differences that arose between us in the last years of his life–and there were many–was that this faith never allowed him to accept what had become of the country his forefathers had fought for.

And it would have been no less an act of faith for him to defend his country from the men who would see it become a medieval theocracy than it was for his assassin to take his life.

The last time I met or spoke to my father was – it seems hard to believe now – the night three years ago that Benazir Bhutto was killed. We had been estranged for most of my life, and just before he died we were estranged for a second time. I was the son of my Indian mother, with whom my father had a year-long relationship in 1980. In my childhood and adolescence, when he was fighting General Zia's dictatorship alongside Bhutto, and was in and out of jail, I had not known him.

I met him for the first time in my adult life at the age of 21, when I went to Lahore to seek him out. For some time, a promising, but awkward relationship, which included many trips to Lahore and family holidays with his young wife and six other children, developed between us.

The cause for that first estrangement, my father had always explained, was that it would have been impossible for him to be in politics in Pakistan with an Indian wife and a half-Indian son. And, in the end, as much as Pakistan had been the cause of our first estrangement, it was also the cause of our second, which began soon after the London bombings, when my father wrote me an angry letter about a story I had written for Prospect magazine in which I described the British second-generation Pakistani as the genus of Islamic terrorism in Britain.

My father was angry as a Muslim, though he was not a practising man of faith, and as a Pakistani; he accused me of blackening the Taseer name by bringing disrepute to a family of patriots. The letter and the new silence that arose between us prompted a book, Stranger to History, in which I discussed openly many things about my father's religion, Pakistan and my parents' relationship. Its publication freakishly coincided –though he might well have been offended even as a private citizen by what I wrote – with my father's return to politics, after a hiatus of nearly 15 years.

The book made final the distance between us; and a great part of the oblique pain I now feel has to do with mourning a man who was present for most of my life as an absence.

And yet I do mourn him, for whatever the trouble between us, there were things I never doubted about him: his courage, which, truly, was like an incapacity for fear, and his love of Pakistan. I said earlier that Pakistan was part of his faith, but that he himself was not a man of faith. His Islam, though it could inform his political ideas, now giving him a special feeling for the cause of the Palestinians and the Kashmiris, now a pride in the history of Muslims from Andalusia to Mughal India, was not total; it was not a complete vision of a society founded in faith.

He was a man in whom various and competing ideas of sanctity could function. His wish for his country was not that of the totality of Islam, but of a society built on the achievements of men, on science, on rationality, on modernity.

But, to look hard at the face of my father's assassin is to see that in those last moments of his life my father faced the gun of a man whose vision of the world, nihilistic as it is, could admit no other.

And where my father and I would have parted ways in the past was that I believe Pakistan and its founding in faith, that first throb of a nation made for religion by people who thought naively that they would restrict its role exclusively to the country's founding, was responsible for producing my father's killer.

For if it is science and rationality whose fruit you wish to see appear in your country, then it is those things that you must enshrine at its heart; otherwise, for as long as it is faith, the men who say that Pakistan was made for Islam, and that more Islam is the solution, will always have the force of an ugly logic on their side. And better men, men like my father, will be reduced to picking their way around the bearded men, the men with one vision that can admit no other, the men who look to the sanctities of only one Book.

In the days before his death, these same men had issued religious edicts against my father, burned him in effigy and threatened his life. Why? Because he defended the cause of a poor Christian woman who had been accused – and sentenced to die – for blasphemy.

My father, because his country was founded in faith, and blood – a million people had died so that it could be made–could not say that the sentence was wrong; the sentence stood; all he sought for Aasia Bibi was clemency on humanitarian grounds. But it was enough to demand his head.

What my father could never say was what I suspect he really felt: "The very idea of a blasphemy law is primitive; no woman, in any humane society, should die for what she says and thinks."

And when finally my father sought the repeal of the laws that had condemned her, the laws that had become an instrument of oppression in the hands of a majority against its minority, he could not say that the source of the laws, the faith, had no place in a modern society; he had to find a way to make people believe that the religion had been distorted, even though the religion – in the way that only these Books can be – was clear as day about what was meant.

Already, even before his body is cold, those same men of faith in Pakistan have banned good Muslims from mourning my father; clerics refused to perform his last rites; and the armoured vehicle conveying his assassin to the courthouse was mobbed with cheering crowds and showered with rose petals.

I should say too that on Friday every mosque in the country condoned the killer's actions; 2,500 lawyers came forward to take on his defence for free; and the Chief Minister of Punjab, who did not attend the funeral, is yet to offer his condolences in person to my family who sit besieged in their house in Lahore.

And so, though I believe, as deeply as I have ever believed anything, that my father joins that sad procession of martyrs – every day a thinner line – standing between him and his country's descent into fear and nihilism, I also know that unless Pakistan finds a way to turn its back on Islam in the public sphere, the memory of the late governor of Punjab will fade.

And where one day there might have been a street named after him, there will be one named after Malik Mumtaz Qadir, my father's boy-assassin.



'The killer of my father, Salman Taseer, was showered with rose petals by fanatics. How could they do this?' - Telegraph

 

[mehru]

well someone go and tell this to SHEHRBANO TASEER
This is what a common Pakistani facing these days and your father was enjoying the security gaurds....

But common Pakistanies are without any security gaurds.... they face this sort of killing every day and people like you father enjoys the security....

Now you have learned it the hard way how common Pakistani is feeling when they had a drone attack and all family dies....stats shows 19 out 20 people killed by drones are innocent... you can see the ratio SHEHRBANO TASEER........

no offence to SALMAN TASEER death but still these leaders need to open thier eyes now.. or it will go towards InQALAB....

Your anger is just but it is wrongly directed. It's true that Govt failed to protect us but when they can't protect themselves, how can they even protect us? Sudden death has become an unfortunate part of our lives but that doesn't mean that we become insensitive to death.

 

[Leviza]

Your anger is just but it is wrongly directed. It's true that Govt failed to protect us but when they can't protect themselves, how can they even protect us? Sudden death has become an unfortunate part of our lives but that doesn't mean that we become insensitive to death.

i know what you are saying but still you know general public needs to feel that these leaders are one of them, but somehow they dont feel it,

how can we feel this if Rehman Malik on this key position cannot say Bismillah properly and Sura-Iqlaas .....

Key positions like these comes with great responsibilities and they need to choose words properly... use of law might be wrong sometimes but law is not wrong its as simple as use of RED traffic light is used wrong sometimes in Pakistan and people cross it but the purpose of Red traffic light is not wrong...i hope you are getting me....

now that lady was proven guilty by the court and this key person shouldnt said anything against it, we all know that no one can file case against himbecouse of his position as there are different laws for different class people in our country.

how can general public accept court decesions if when need governer can by pass them and say things against it.............

i might be wrong but majority of Pakistani nation cannot be.....

peace