Salman Taseer, the assassinated governor of Punjab, was no paragon of virtue, but the irony of his cold-blooded killing and aftermath will forever burnish his reputation as the last of the liberal leaders of Pakistan. The irony only starts there. Although given a state funeral and three days of official mourning, his political patron and ally, President Asif Ali Zardari, was too frightened to attend the funeral in Lahore because of the security risk. No leading cleric would come forward to perform Taseer’s last rites. And his unrepentant, smiling assassin is being celebrated as a hero by many of his countrymen.
That is the degree of the paranoia, political paralysis and social discord that now afflicts the Land of the Pure. Taseer’s last stand was to fight for a poor Christian village woman, jailed and sentenced to death for allegedly blaspheming the Prophet but Asia Bibi is reportedly one of hundreds of such Christians held in Pakistani prisons on similar charges. In Lahore’s well-off homes, they often find work as domestics because their employers can use their permits to buy liquor legally. It is a similar character, though not Christian, called Blind Zainab who is languishing in jail for the crime of “unlawful fornication” in Mohd. Hanif’s brilliant, best-selling satire of life under Gen Zia-ul-Haq, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. It is such cruel, bigoted laws, especially against defenceless women, that political leaders like Salman Taseer opposed in a country caught in the toils of the three A’s — Allah, Army and America.
In Pakistan’s case, art does not imitate life, rather the reverse may be true. How chillingly close to the bone the truth cuts is borne by recent literary fiction from the country hailed as some of the best writing out of the subcontinent. Through Mohsin Hamid’s lens in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is captured the rise of jihadist culture, in the case of “corrupt idealists” like the upper class, the international executive from New York who grows a beard, expresses delight at World Trade Centre’s bombing and returns home to tell his story in Lahore. Or Daniyal Mueenuddin’s stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders that encapsulate the feudal structures of the rural hinterland, never really dismantled, and portray a male-dominated elite ruthlessly preying upon powerless female victims. It is hard to imagine the rise of political leaders like Mayawati or Nitish Kumar in Pakistan today just as it would require a stretch of the eyeballs to believe that a robust entertainment culture like Bollywood, in all its energetic exhibitionism, could exist there.
The hope of political representation for the disadvantaged on the one hand, and of raucous escapist fantasy on the other broadly symbolise a liberal ethos. A woman Dalit leader can become chief minister of India’s most populous state and a middle class boy like Shah Rukh Khan can become a mega movie star. In India these are achievable aspirations. In Pakistan, such possibilities have narrowed dangerously. Robbed of a democratic tradition and devoid of a large, vigorous middle class, the gap between the rulers and the ruled is a widening abyss. Anyone can step in — and trigger-happy mullahs triumphantly have.
The liberal Pakistani elite lives in a shadowy dark space, holding on, as one commentator in the wake of Taseer’s killing put it, “to their little secrets that are jealously guarded against the bigotry surrounding them”. In Pakistan’s cities, the bootlegger’s cell number is the most precious of all, downloaded racy Bollywood hits are on everyone’s lips, and you’re not worth the seat in the National Assembly if you don’t race round in an SUV (with tinted window panes, of course). But out in the streets, girls don’t wear jeans and it is advisable to pay lip service to Allah five times a day.
Salman Taseer, son of a scholar, nephew of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, trained as a chartered accountant, liked his whisky, was a philanderer, self-made millionaire and ardent Bhuttoist. He was hardly eligible for the halo of Islamic martyrdom. But he died upholding Pakistan’s vanishing liberal tradition.