Archive for the 'Obituaries' Category

Assassinated Punjab governor Salman Taseer’s India links include the writer Aatish Taseer, the son he had with journalist Tavleen Singh. His murder in Pakistan silences a the voice of a secular politician and has uncanny echoes with the assassination of Indira Gandhi. In The Guardian, Declan Walsh writes about the man who wasn’t afraid of going against the grain of majority opinion.

Salman Taseer

Pakisatan lurched into a fresh crisis after an outspoken secular politician was shot dead by a fanatic who opposed reform of the country’s draconian blasphemy laws. Punjab’s governor, Salman Taseer, was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards as he stepped from his car in Islamabad’s Kohsar market, a favoured haunt of westerners and wealthy Pakistanis. The assassin, who belonged to an elite police force tasked with protecting Taseer, shot the governor at least nine times before dropping his weapon and surrendering to colleagues. Officials named him as Mumtaz Qadri. “A guard jumped out of a car with a flashing light on top of it. He pointed his Kalashnikov at [Taseer's] window and blasted it,” said one witness. more

In The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Salmaan Taseer teased the edge in private as he did in public. He married thrice and a brief tryst with Indian journalist Tavleen Singh produced his best-known progeny, author Aatish Taseer, who made the difficult and poignant relationship with his father the subject of a celebrated book called Stranger to History.

Excerpt from Aatish Taseer‘s Stranger to History:

Aatish Taseer

”When I was very young, my mother explained her separation from my father in terms of a fight with a friend, not unlike those I had routinely with my friends. When my questions became more sophisticated, she told me about his political career and how it would have been impossible if we had been in his life. And though I didn’t have a good impression of my father, I don’t think I had a bad one either.

She often said, ‘Sometimes people come together for a reason, to create something or someone, and then they go their own ways.’ This made me think, at least when I was child, of my father’s departure as something unavoidable for which no one was to blame. My grandfather, of course, made it seem like just one more chapter in the Partition saga he had lived through.

When I was eight or nine, I wrote my father a letter, expressing my desire to see him, which I sent with my mother to Pakistan where she was covering the election. ‘If I see him, I’ll give it to him,’ she said, ‘but be prepared that he may not reply. What will you do if he doesn’t?’

‘I’ll leave it and never get in touch with him again.’As it happened, with my mother covering the election and my father contesting it, they did run into each other. My mother gave him my letter. He took it and told her he would reply, but never did. And for years I made no effort to contact him again.”