Assassination of Salman Taseer (punishment)

The assassination of an outspoken secular politician by one of his elite police guards on Tuesday plunged the Pakistani government deeper into political crisis and highlighted the threat of militant infiltration even within the nation’s security forces. The killing of Salman Taseer, the prominent governor of Punjab province, was another grim reminder of the risks that Pakistani leaders take to oppose religious extremists, at a time when the US is pushing Pakistan for greater cooperation in the war in Afghanistan by cracking down on militant groups such as the Taliban. Taseer, a successful businessman and publisher of a liberal English-language daily newspaper, was exceptional, even within the secular-minded Pakistan Peoples Party, for his vocal opposition to the religious parties and the extremism they spread. He was imprisoned in the 1970s under the military dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq for it and was still opposing the religious parties 30 years later. He recently took up a campaign to repeal Pakistan’s contentious blasphemy laws, which were passed under Zia as a way to promote Islam and unite the country. The laws have been misused to convict minority Pakistanis as the Islamic forces unleashed by the general have gathered strength. The laws prescribe a mandatory death sentence for anyone convicted of insulting Islam. Religious parties staged vigorous demonstrations of thousands of people last weekend to protest the campaign by Taseer, even burning him in effigy. Taseer countered in comments on his Twitter account and elsewhere. “Religous right trying 2 pressurize from the street their support of blasphemy laws. Point is it must be decided in Parliament not on the road,” he wrote on 26 December in the imperfect shorthand typical of such posts. “I was under huge pressure sure 2 cow down b4 rightest pressure on blasphemy. Refused. Even if I’m the last man standing,” he posted on 31 December. On Tuesday, Taseer was shot in daylight multiple times at close range as he was getting into his car in Islamabad at the Kohsar Market, an area frequently visited by the city’s elite. His attacker was identified as Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, an elite-force security guard, who surrendered to police immediately afterwards and implied he had killed the governor because of his campaign to amend the blasphemy laws. “I am a slave of the Prophet, and the punishment for one who commits blasphemy is death,” he told a television crew from Dunya TV that arrived at the scene shortly after the killing, according to Nasim Zahra, the director of news at the channel. It was not yet clear whether he had acted alone or on behalf of some extremist group. Taseer’s death will serve as a chilling warning to any politician who speaks out against religious parties and their agenda and will certainly end immediate attempts to amend the blasphemy laws, politicians said. “It is a loss to progressive forces; he stood up for what he believed in,” said one of his party colleagues, Sherry Rehman, a legislator. Taseer’s death will also be a severe loss for the governing Pakistan Peoples Party and President Asif Ali Zardari. Taseer was the President’s personal friend and close political ally. As governor of Punjab, the nation’s populous heartland, he was a bulwark against spreading radicalism and the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, led by Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz.