“Smash that cup, O Bachchoo
The poison of regret
Some make love to remember
Some make love to forget...”
From Songs for the
Bulbultarang

The assassination of Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab state, in a popular public place has made him the latest martyr to the idea of Pakistan. His killer, Mumtaz Qadri, a 26-year-old commando detailed to be one of his bodyguards shot 27 bullets into him at point blank range and then surrendered himself.
Qadri told his captors that he “killed him for Islam”. He confessed that he had been planning the murder ever since he was assigned to this particular bodyguard duty just four days earlier. He also boasted that he was proud of having eliminated a “blasphemer”.
He didn’t, of course, mean that Taseer himself had transgressed the blasphemy laws of Pakistan, which carry a mandatory death sentence for convicted transgressors. He meant that the governor had spoken out against the death sentence imposed on Asya Bibi, a Christian woman who allegedly insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Taseer had also pronounced himself in favour of ameliorating or abolishing the present blasphemy law.
An appointee of the present Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Taseer was universally known as a liberal. He was quoted in a recent international interview echoing the words of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan who said that the state born out of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was to be a “secular” entity in which Christians and Hindus would be free to worship unmolested in their churches and temples. The blasphemy law as it stands was brought in by the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq and its proposed modification or abolition today, which has found focus in the case and conviction of Asya Bibi, is the latest dividing line between the liberals and the fundos.
The assassination comes at a time when the ruling coalition is in trouble as the Muttahid Quami Movement has withdrawn from support of the majority partner, the PPP.
The crises of Pakistan, with the devastating floods, continuing lack of the reach of state provision and of challenges to the writ of the state, go from bad to worse.
In this climate, the ironies of Taseer’s martyrdom to this liberal idea of the state, an idea which the work and life of the Quaid-e-Azam, Jinnah would undoubtedly support, multiply.
Qadri avowedly sees himself as a martyr of Islam. He has taken the path of the suicide bombers and terrorists who are convinced that their act of killing people, whether they be working in a building on the Wall Street, praying in a mosque in Islamabad or sleeping on a railway platform in Mumbai, will take them to heaven. They undoubtedly see themselves as martyrs to their religion and to the cause of the state they serve which may be Pakistan or the Universal Caliphate to come.
The very personal irony is that of Taseer’s half-Indian half-Sikh-by-birth son, the writer and novelist Aatish. He is a friend but I betray nothing of that friendship if I say that his first book Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands, is about discovering his father and his father’s professed faith, and that before and after he wrote it his father Salman accused him of being insufficiently Islamic.
And now in the wake of his murder, 500 “moderate Islamic scholars” have issued a statement saying that “anyone who expresses grief over Taseer’s assassination could suffer the same fate”.
Now one knows that Pakistan has curious history books which portray the subjugation, defeat and slaughter of the populations of their territories by ruthless Arab invaders as “great victories”, but their dictionaries must now have very peculiar definitions of “moderate” and of “scholar”. Kher!
If I can arrogate to myself, only for a moment, the position of adviser to my friend’s father, I would plead with Taseer as he reaches the gates of heaven and is met by the angel Jibrail, to boast not that he was a martyr to Islam, but that he was a martyr to the idea and, yes, to the very survival and continuity of Pakistan. Let Qadri claim to be a martyr to Islam after he is hanged — and let him take his chances.
It is important that Taseer is seen as such in the world and most of all in Pakistan, because the country has not in all its years of existence decisively defined its soul.
One may say that no country has or can, but we can certainly discern a distinct identity and inclination in, say, North Korea, Iran, China and even in capitalist and wildly democratic India. We all knew what Stalinist Russia was about and the world knows, and some of it craves, the myths by which the US of America defines itself.
Pakistan can go nowhere and can’t even initiate the capability to recover from the floods that continue to devastate it until it decides between the martyrdoms of Taseer and Qadri. Have Pakistan’s political parties decided to take a lead in steering the country towards this crucial decision, or are they, as all my Pakistani friends tell me, taking advantage of the chaos to profit from it as individuals and interest groups?
The instinctive response of any observer would be that the first step towards finding its dynamic is the imposition of order. Pakistan has done that only through the imposition of military rule. The instinct of the same observer might rather that order come about through the will of the people.
Late last year Pervez Musharraf launched his political party the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML). The non-Pakistani observer’s opinion of this party’s manifesto will carry no weight with anyone, but could it be that Pakistan can only be brought to order and face the future under the elected leadership of someone who has a clear vision of this dilemma; an experience of trying to resolve it without the weight of a popular ballot behind him and may, with such a force be instrumental in resolving it; has not corruptly profited from the chaos imposed by the dilemma; can even without the swords on his shoulders command the respect of the armed forces and has demonstrated through the measures of his albeit military and disputedly-democratic rule that he is on the side of the redeeming (is it too early or silly to call it the Taseerian) idea of Pakistan?