Daily Times

“The sorrowful smell of the mist,

Lingering over the Indus,

Gentle waves of rice, dung and rind,

This is the salt cry of Sindh,

As I die let me feel,

The fragrance of tears” — Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.

“It was a Sindhi poet, Shah Abdul Latif, who captured the forlornness of his country in this haunting verse,” wrote Salmaan Taseer in the opening chapter of his 1979 book, Bhutto: A Political Biography. I have read these words many times but had never once thought that the forlornness might get deeper than the deepest depression one could feel. But the assassination of Salmaan Taseer has left many of us even more devastated and depressed than what Shah Latif could depict.

I do not mourn Salmaan Taseer alone but I also mourn those who have been killed before him on the perilous path of speaking their mind, and those who will be killed in the future on this journey. Ayesha Siddiqa, Kamran Shafi, Nadeem Farooq Paracha, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Sherry Rehman and so many others are living on borrowed time. It is not a matter of if but when an indoctrinated bigot let loose by the deep state will get to them or, for that matter, any of us who decline to follow the rotten creed that it has been peddling for decades.

However, I have a feeling that Salmaan Taseer would not have wanted to be remembered with melancholy. His illustrious father, Dr M D Taseer, once said:

“Parwana jal kay dil ki muradon ko pa gaya

Aur shama reh gayi rukh-e-zeba liay huay” (Translation: The light-loving moth has died caressing the candle flame. The candle thus remains alone in all its elegance).

It is nearly impossible to accurately translate the above Urdu verse, which my father, Malik Rahat Ali, had quoted while writing Dr M D Taseer’s obituary for Edward’s College, Peshawar’s magazine Tajjali (light) in 1951. The obituary was titled ‘Aik raushan dimagh tha, na raha’ (an enlightened mind is no more). It is amazing how references to light and progressive thought keep popping up when discussing the Taseers and in the work of the Taseers themselves. Pakistan, and the liberal thought within Pakistan, is the candle that Salmaan and M D Taseer loved to the extent that to see it remain alight, they would dedicate their lives to it.

When thinking of Salmaan Taseer, two images come to mind. One is of a political activist and the second is of a patron of progressive and liberal thought. Perhaps senior members of the Indo-Pakistani leftist movement will recall that Dr M D Taseer, along with Abdullah Malik and Rajindra Singh Bedi had pioneered a liberal publishing house called Sangham Publishers in 1947, before the partition. I would not be wrong in assuming that the Daily Times and its media affiliates came into being due to Salmaan Taseer’s desire to follow in his father’s footsteps.

In his patronage of liberal publications, Salmaan Taseer’s image merges with that of the greats like the late Mian Iftikharuddin and Mazhar Ali Khan, the latter having been a beneficiary of the radical study circles conducted by Salmaan Taseer’s father. Many criticised Salmaan Taseer for his opulent lifestyle but, like Mian Iftikharuddin and his Progressive Papers Limited, Salmaan Taseer dedicated his personal fortune to the cause of publishing the unvarnished truth and the people’s right to know this truth. It would not have been possible for this paper’s editorial board to carry itself independently were it not for Salmaan Taseer’s personal commitment to not only this project but to the very freedoms of speech and expression.

Indeed, Salmaan Taseer was one of the very few people who had mustered the courage to criticise Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) during the latter’s heyday. In the aforementioned biography of ZAB, Salmaan Taseer wrote, “During his first years of power I found myself, like many of my countrymen and many foreigners, torn between breathless admiration and violent antipathy for the man.” It is pertinent to note that he had started interviewing ZAB in 1976 for the book and by then was a known critic of several of ZAB’s policies. But on the whole he remained in love with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and remained involved with organising the agitation against the Islamo-fascism of General Ziaul Haq.

In the mid-1980s, he also made his mark as an op-ed columnist writing in the Urdu daily Jang, after the junta had muzzled the PPP-affiliated papers Musawat and Amn. After the 1988 elections, he became the deputy opposition leader in the Punjab Assembly and, along with the opposition leader Rana Shaukat Mahmood and many others, faced imprisonment and torture at the hands of the then Punjab government. It was this activist-intellectual image of Salmaan Taseer that inspired not only the workers of his own party but many in the Movement for the Restoration for Democracy (MRD) as well. Not only that but it encouraged many of us to disagree with his politics in the second phase of his political career the way he did not agree with ZAB.

However, people like Salmaan Taseer never consider disagreements to be incompatible with democracy. The only thing incompatible with the democratic process is a fanatical belief in one’s moral and religious certitude. What makes such certitude more ominous is its deployment by the forces, which try to trip democracy at every step. Some are drawing parallels between the assassinations of ZAB and Salmaan Taseer. But to me, Salmaan Taseer’s murder is a déjà vu reminder of Murtaza Bhutto’s killing. Despite the current federal government turning into a minority regime it would have plodded along for a while, so those who have derailed every democratic government in Pakistan opted to expedite things.

A lone assassin killing the governor of the largest province is a theory that most will not buy and I suspect that we will never know the truth. But one thing is clear: a seasoned politician, a courageous fighter and a distinguished leader of the PPP died for a principled cause. He may have said in the words of his uncle, Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

“Karo kaj jabeen pe sar-e-kafan, meray qatilon ko guman na ho

Keh ghuroor-e-ishq ka bankpan pas-e-marg hum ne bhula diya” (Translation by Sarvat Rahman: Let the shroud be jaunty on my brow, so my assassins never doubt, That the grace, which pride in love gave us, even in death was not betrayed).

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com