The first time I saw Governor SalmaanTaseer, it was a beautiful May afternoon in 2009, in the small town of Northampton, Massachusetts. He was walking down a hill with his wife and daughter by his side. They were laughing, dressed up for a graduation party. In the months after his death, as he became the great, transcendent symbol for freedom in Pakistan, I often thought of that ordinary moment.
I was not a journalist then, and it had seemed at the time, that Pakistan had its fair share of men and women writing and speaking up on the nation’s television screens. ButJanuary 4thwas the moment of our disclosure, the unveiling of a deformed heart. The only thing that emerged for certain in the trauma and frenzy of the days and months that followed, was our journalistic mediocrity. Governor Taseer’s politics defined many things in Pakistan. He was a powerful advocate for the Kalabagh Dam, for minority rights, for a progressive education for our children, for better business practices. There were no blurred lines in his living, just as there were none in his death.
SalmaanTaseer was not strictly speaking, a philosopher. In the manner of theorists, he was not one to accept the human condition, the idea of the unquestionable order of things was perhaps lost on him. That is most often the case with men who are born to lead. Those who challenge the world, fighting sometimes solitary battles for the dignity of other people. Those who bring us face to face with ourselves, our entrenched moral dilemmas, our humanity’s deepest confusions. And he was all these things- but he was also a man who loved his children, who sauntered down a green hill once with his arm around his daughter, beautiful and unafraid. I saw them, I was there.
Amal Khan is the Features Editor at The Nation