Salmaan Taseer

Birth and education

He was born on 31 May 1944, in Simla, East Punjab, British India, to a family of mixed race. being of Kashmiri descent on his father's side and of English descent on his mother's side. His father was Muhammad Din Taseer (M. D. Taseer), who hailed from Ajnala near Amritsar, and was a professor at Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, Amritsar, having obtained his PhD in the United Kingdom. Taseer's mother was Christobel George, a British woman who, upon her wedding, converted to Islam and took the name Bilqis.

Taseer's father died in 1950 at the age of 47, when Taseer was only six years old. Taseer and his two sisters were brought up by their mother in relative poverty, in an environment with very strong Christian and influences, and a general absence of immersion in local Pakistani culture, because his mother kept no contact with the relatives of her late husband.

Taseer attended St. Anthony's School, a school run by Christian missionaries in Lahore, where he was a classmate of Nawaz Sharif. He then obtained a degree in Chartered Accountancy from London.

Marital and extramarital relationships

Taseer was married twice and also had two confirmed extra-marital relationships. With his first wife Yasmeen Sehgal, he had one son, Shaan, and two daughters, Sara and Sanam. His second wife, Aamna Taseer, is chairperson of an investment management company. They have two sons, Shahbaz and Shehryar and a daughter, Shehrbano.

Taseer had a brief extramarital relationship with the Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, a Sikh. Taseer met Singh during a book promotion trip to India in March 1980. Their son, Aatish (born 1980), is a writer and journalist. According to Aatish, the relationship between his parents was an "affair (which) lasted little more than a week." Aatish is a freelance journalist in the UK and has written a book – Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands – about his estranged relationship with his biological father. Aatish had no contact with his father until well into adulthood.

In the early 1980s, Taseer had a year-long affair with the Bollywood actress Simi Garewal.

Political career

Taseer started his political career in his student era as a member of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the late 1960s. He was a part of the movement for Bhutto's freedom and opposed his arrest and death sentence. He also wrote a political biography on Bhutto titled Bhutto: A political biography (1980). Taseer was also known to be one of the trusted aides of Bhutto's daughter and political heir, Benazir Bhutto.

In the 1988 general elections, Taseer became a member of the Punjab Assembly from Lahore. In the 1990, 1993 and 1997 general elections, he stood for election to be an MNA but lost. In 2007, he was appointed the interim Federal Minister for Industries, Production and Special Initiatives. On 15 May 2008, Taseer was designated for the office of Governor of Punjab by the PPP-led coalition government.

In December 2010, Taseer was alleged to have left the country for several days without handing over charge to the Punjab Assembly Speaker. This meant that the province was without a constitutional head, and it also rendered the assembly speaker ineligible to preside over sessions. Leaving the province without informing his successor was in violation of the constitution and this led to Punjab Assembly Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal sending a letter to Prime Minister Gilani calling for the removal of Salmaan Taseer by the President. Evidence provided by ICAO on the governor's travel abroad led to a case being filed in court for breach of the constitution.

Business career

Taseer set up several chartered accountancy and management consultancy firms early in his career. In 1995, he established the First Capital Securities Corporation (FCSC), a full-service brokerage house with equity participation by Smith Barney, Inc., USA, and HG Asia Hong Kong.

Taseer founded the Worldcall group with a payphone network in 1996. The group has grown over the years to become a major private-sector telecom operator with a national and regional footprint. A majority stake in Worldcall was acquired in 2008 by Omantel, the Sultanate of Oman's incumbent operator. Taseer also owned an English news channel in Pakistan, Business Plus; and the first children's channel, Wikkid Plus; and was the publisher of the English language Daily Times.

Incarceration

Taseer was kept in solitary confinement for six months and three weeks at the Lahore Fort, where he was shackled to the ground. He did not meet a single person or read a book or newspaper during his incarceration and emerged 40 pounds lighter than when he had gone in.

Taseer was arrested 16 times and placed under house arrest several times in jails around Faisalabad, Jhang and Lahore.

Death

In an interview with Meher Bukhari on Samaa TV, Taseer commented on his view about the country's blasphemy law and on filing a mercy petition for Asia Bibi, who was sentenced to death by a court under the law.

On 4 January 2011, one of Taseer's bodyguards, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, shot him 27 times with an AK-47 assault rifle at Kohsar Market, near his home in Sector F6, Islamabad, as he was returning to his car after meeting a friend for lunch. Kohsar Market is a popular shopping and cafe spot for the city's elite and expatriates. Eight hours before his assassination, he tweeted an Urdu couplet by Shakeel Badayuni: "My resolve is so strong that I do not fear the flames from without, I fear only the radiance of the flowers, that it might burn my garden down."

The next day, hundreds of people turned up for his funeral in Lahore in spite of denunciations by some Sunni clerics and religious scholars against mourning Taseer. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and many supporters of the ruling PPP were seen attending the funeral prayer. The funeral prayers were finally led by Allama Afzal Chisti of the Ulema wing of the PPP after the chief cleric of the Badshahi Mosque, who had initially agreed to offer prayers, backed off at the last moment, saying he was going out of town. Taseer was buried at a military cantonment in Lahore.

The assassin Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri was from Punjab, and was part of the security detail provided to Taseer by the Elite Police. After the shooting, Qadri threw his weapon down and put his hands up when one of his colleagues aimed at him. He reportedly pleaded to be arrested. After the murder, more than 500 clerics voiced support for the crime and urged a general boycott of Taseer's funeral. Supporters of Mumtaz Qadri blocked police attempting to bring him to the Anti-Terrorism Court in Rawalpindi, and some supporters showered him with rose petals. On 1 October 2011, Qadri was sentenced to death by a Pakistani Anti Terrorist court at Islamabad for murdering Taseer. Qadri was executed on 29 February 2016.

Reactions

Possible repercussions

In the international media, his death was seen as destabilising the already tenuous situation in the country, particularly in the light of resignation of members of the ruling coalition. One local analyst said the death was a "major setback for Pakistan, which is trying to get out of this vicious cycle of violence and worsening economy. [The killing] will certainly weaken the party position in Punjab." It was suggested that the killing was indicative of a "deeper trend" of "religious intolerance" afflicting Pakistan. The son of the late governor, Shahbaz Taseer, who was a witness in Mumtaz Qadri's trial, was kidnapped on 26 August 2011 while he was on his way to work in Lahore, Pakistan. After twelve days of unsuccessful attempts by the Pakistani police to recover him, some news sources reported that Shahbaaz, along with an American aid worker, Dr Warren Weinstein, was held captive by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Shahbaz was recovered by security and intelligence forces from Balochistan’s Kuchlak area on 8 March 2016.

Taseer's assassination may dissuade other Pakistani politicians from speaking out against the blasphemy law, according to a former U.S. State Department intelligence analyst with the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.