How Indians look at Taseer’s assassination

[luckyyy]

^^^^Another BS piece by Jawed Naqvi. He's always too eager to please his newspaper employers with stories of Hindu extremism in India.

actually there is no need to corelate any incident happened in pakistan with india.......

the tittle say " How Indians look at Taseer’s assassination"

answer is : we won't look at it at all..

 

[tallboy123]

Who is taseer...???
I Haven't seen his face in my life at all..not even on internet...
Ofcourse no one in my city has seen him or know about him...

 

[insomniac00]

lol then be quite and stick ur nose in ur own and stop commenting...lol...

 

[IamINDIA]

ajtr is pakistani,itsa really cheap way of india bashing.....

 

[AR]

why pakistani media is so curious about Indian response???
... and then they say India should not interfere in others 'Internal' matter

 

[khanz]

why pakistani media is so curious about Indian response???
... and then they say India should not interfere in others 'Internal' matter

but why your newpapers are curious about taseer or even commenting on us then ? your media does take a great deal of interest in pakistani affairs.

 

[jayron]

Guys its a cartoon! It is supposed to be exaggerated. Like Pak's Blasphemy law, the government I believe is using the sedition law to silence Binayak Sen and lock him up. But the similarity ends there.

 

[newdelhinsa]

What a poor correlation again by this Javed Naqvi clown. This is second such article i have seen by this man where he has correlated Pakistani misfortunes with India contemporary issues; having no equivalence at all.

It was better for him to write dedicate articles on India and Pakistani issues without doing bias correlations. Ironically his articles are published every time when Pakistan struggles with some acute problems and he tries to act anesthetic who numbs Pakistani pains by scratching Indian wounds. May be this is the only agenda is planted in Indian main stream media.

Any one with adequate cognitive ability can go on length to mock his writings but he has become so predictable that it will be a waste of time giving any more attention to it.

 

[syntax_error]

With all the corelation done by this guy....it seems he most likely has a degree in statistics rather than journalism .....

 

[Hammy007]

10 years pehle tu in ke himmat nai hote thi pakistan ki ideology peh haath uthaane ki?? and now they have guts to speak openly in our affairs, how wierd...

 

[ajtr]

This death in Pakistan​

The number of obituaries written ruing the terrible loss of Salman Taseer tells how popular he was among his fellow liberals on both sides of the border. In his death Pakistan has lost one of its most articulate, modern and fearless liberal leaders. But as somebody who knew Salman more than a bit, particularly in his street-fighting years (and my pavement-thumping years as a reporter), I am surprised by how little is said of him as a genuine Pakistani patriot and a proud Muslim. Also, while he had the Pakistani liberal’s usual respect for India’s democracy, his belief in the two-nation theory, the ideology of Pakistan was unshakeable. He would pamper silly a friend visiting from India — but if you as much as mentioned Kashmir, he would pounce on it as if somebody had bowled one short outside Inzamam ul-Haq’s off-stump.
By merely remembering him as a Pakistani liberal, as if that would disqualify one from being a staunch Pakistani nationalist and Muslim, we are not only being unfair to a most fascinating, brave and charming politician, but also missing a most significant and scary developing story in Pakistan. Pakistani anti-Indianism can broadly be divided into two categories. One is its liberal elite’s intellectual dislike/ suspicion/ distrust of India based purely on our contrasting national ideologies, further coloured by an almost unanimously shared outrage over the “injustice” in Kashmir. The other stream is more simplistic, represented by some in the religious right, particularly in Pakistani Punjab, who detest India on purely religious grounds: “How seriously can you take a country run by infidels?” Until a decade ago, this was a tiny minority you could ridicule or ignore. It is no longer so. And Taseer’s death has further shifted the balance in favour of these India-hating lunatics, and weakened those not exactly friends of India, the more rational, India-baiting, modern Pakistani nationalists.

This fundamental complexity in Pakistan needs some explaining. Just being a liberal in Pakistan does not mean being pro-India. Jinnah, for example, has been the most liberal Pakistani leader so far. You wouldn’t call him pro-India. The original Pakistani distrust — even fear and hatred — of India has been rooted in its new nationalism that Jinnah founded. The English-speaking Pakistani military-bureaucratic-political-intellectual leadership may have viewed India as a rival, a threat, an expansionist, arrogant, militaristic hegemon, whatever. But all this was rooted entirely in their own faith in the two-nation theory and Jinnah’s idea of nationhood as against that of Nehru’s India. For the first 50 years since Partition, this was the dominant — in fact mostly the only — anti-Indianism. Sometimes we merely argued with it intellectually, and sometimes we fought wars. But even our wars were fought quite cleanly, not like communal riots. Since this phenomenon was more about competitive nationalism, there was also a cute, sort of sporty side to it, laced with nostalgia, and even some shared ideals. At the extreme right of this “Ideology of Pakistan” were those that questioned the legitimacy of the Indian state and believed in its ultimate self-destruction, thinking it too unwieldy, large, diverse or chaotic to survive. Taseer, actually, belonged to the very left of this nationalistic stream.

The other thought is the one we earlier laughed at; for these five decades it was only believed by a small group of right-wing clerics or the extreme right-wingers in the Pakistani army (mostly of lower ranks). They believed that India was not just an unviable or unmanageable state, but an immoral, illegitimate and even an infidel one. Their dislike for India was pure hatred, and their belief in the “inevitability” of “Hindu” India’s destruction was rooted in faith. How could a country of India’s size be run successfully by infidels? For far too long this was such a marginal view that it was seen as good comic relief by policy-making elites on both sides. That is why, when a prominent Pakistani cleric declared in a public speech that he was leading a jihad that would unfurl the green flag of Islam on Delhi’s Red Fort, the late S.K. Singh, then our high commissioner in Islamabad, made a (very gently) mocking statement that Maulana Sahib was most welcome to visit India and should he come to his mission for a visa, he would be welcomed with folded hands, a bouquet and a fruit-basket. You cannot laugh it away in the same manner now when the cleric says something similar now.

Let’s try to simplify it further. In the older, gentler and more reasonable, ideological nationalist view, Kashmir was, and is, the “core” issue between our two countries. You settle this, and we can live peacefully, even like the US and Canada. For the now rising wave of Islamic nationalists, Kashmir is merely a small symptom: the very existence of India, or to put it more brutally, and correctly, “Hindu” India is the problem.

You can no longer dismiss these people as mere nutcases. This last post-9/11 decade has seen this lunatic, religious and fundamentalist version of Islamic nationalism increasingly marginalise the modern nationalists. It started slowly with Zia-ul-Haq’s infiltration of Pakistan’s institutions with the religious right. In fact, Pakistani writer Shuja Nawaz describes this lot of recruits to the Pakistan army as “Zia bharti” in his brilliant Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army and the Wars Within. They have also spread into the ISI and have nonchalantly run rogue operations in India — including, as is now becoming clearer, 26/11. You will also find their fingerprints on the first (post-Babri) serial bombings in Mumbai in 1993. Salman’s death is one more shot, their biggest victory after Benazir’s. It will stun the modern nationalists. It will further shake the elected government’s already minimal resolve to take on the violent right. And it will narrow India’s options and ideas on how to respond to this new reality in Pakistan.

Postscript: Here is my favourite Salman Taseer story. Sometime in 1993, I took him out to lunch on one of his visits to Delhi, and we talked the usual stuff for a couple of hours. He came back with me to my office (at India Today) for some more gossip, and as we were climbing the narrow Connaught Place steps to the second floor, he asked me what would be the problem if a plebiscite was held and the Kashmiris opted for Pakistan. I said, it would be a mortal blow to the secular nationalism we are building as, thereon, all other Muslims will be seen as suspect, and may even be victimised. His jaw tightened, he made a mock gesture to roll up his sleeve, and said, “if you victimise your Muslims, you think the 14 crore Muslims of Pakistan will sit like cowards and do nothing?” (His exact expression: “Hum 14 crore Pakistani Mussalman bhi chudiya pehen ke nahin baithe rahenge.”) Now how would you describe Salman? In my book, a liberal Pakistani nationalist, a proud Muslim, and of course so bluntly Punjabi.

 

[American Pakistani]

wow I don't understand one thing, Benazir Bhutto was OK, but was Salman Taseer soo popular in the world? I saw loads of channals including covering this incident as if it happen in their own country.lol

Maybe the reason is to proof that Pakistan is unsafe & unstable country & bla bla.

 

[ajtr]

Martyr Salman​

Martyr Salman
The assassination of the pro-minority Pakistan Punjab governor comes as a wakeup call for that troubled state, says N.V.Subramanian.

New Delhi, 6 January 2011: The assassination of Pakistan Punjab's governor, Salman Taseer, for his robust stand against the blasphemy law and for championing minority and women's rights comes as a wakeup call for that beleaguered country. Unless Pakistan embraces Mohammed Ali Jinnah's vision of a secular republic protecting minority rights but sans his anti-India sentiments, it will unstoppably descend into chaos and self-destruction. This is perhaps a known theme. But for Pakistan's good, it bears repetition.

Indians, including this writer, have a problem with Jinnah. They cannot reconcile the Jinnah who dreamed of a secular Pakistan with one of the key architects of Partition and the chief political propagator of the Two-Nation Theory. Presumably, Pakistanis have that problem too, or at least those of them who take Pakistan's Islamic identity too seriously.

A section of them believe that an Islamist Pakistan, run on Sharia law and denying rights to women and minorities, is a natural end-state of Jinnah's demand for Partition. It would not impress them that Jinnah took the creation of Pakistan as something in the manner of a lawyer's brief and employed the Two-Nation Theory as a smart weapon to succeed. Considering the epic tragedy that Pakistan is today, it would appear a case of a clever lawyer trumping a wise politician.

But this writer would argue for Pakistanis to consider Jinnah's vision of a secular Pakistan for itself, ignoring Jinnah's links to Partition or his animus towards India. It would nearly be an argument to embrace the idea of a secular Pakistan for its own value, regardless of who propagated it.

In secular Pakistan may lurk hope for a natural Pakistani identity in which Islam need not clash with ideas of modernism, moderation, pluralism or gender equality. And secular Pakistan will give it a unique identity of its own without being presented in terms of as a permanent competitor to India and as a counterforce to it.

But how is the idea of a secular Pakistan to be reconstructed from scratch? At a minimum, it needs the comprehensive conversion of the Pakistan military to secularism, because the armed forces have been so central to consigning the country to its warped and wretched fate.

But the Pakistan military and secular ideals mate about as well as oil does to water. They won't mix at all. Many complex factors are at work here, and Pakistan's India-centric strategic aims complicate matters.

Every Pakistani military dictator, from Ayub Khan to Parvez Musharraf, has taken the reflexive and erroneous view of India as Hindu India (a mirror opposite of Islamic Pakistan), which Islamist irregulars and terrorists would be able to subvert and dismember. Ayub was not a zealot in the mould of Zia-ul-Haq nor was Musharraf, who was fairly taken in by Jinnah's constituent assembly secular-Pakistan speech and was admiring of the (secular) Turkish army for stabilizing Turkey.

But in all the Kashmir wars Pakistan has prosecuted against India, jihadists were employed. The Pakistan military continues to believe in the Two-Nation Theory in a graduated form, which is of an Islamic Pakistan standing to confront a Hindu India, despite the contrary evidence of the separation of Bangladesh. Bent upon giving India a thousand cuts, it is Pakistan that is bleeding to death.



It is strange that Pakistanis do not trust Jinnah who delivered Pakistan for his ideas of a secular country. It is unfair to blame Pakistanis as a whole for this state of affairs. Regardless of how threatened Pakistan's democracy is, it is a fact that it survives in that country, and it is also true that Pakistan's judiciary is stronger than ever, and it has a free media which by and large exhibits tolerant views.

In election after election, unless they be brazenly rigged, mainstream political parties have been favoured to the negligence of extreme religious groupings. Religious groups have always commanded street power. But they have surpassed their capacity to oppress Pakistan only in alliance with the military.

Today, as before, the Pakistan military stands in the way of Pakistan gaining an identity for itself which is over and beyond Islamic. For its own survival and prosperity as a state within a state, it has invested India with vast demonic designs against Pakistan, which justifies the seeking of strategic depth in Afghanistan, even if it means aligning with the devil, in the form of the various Taliban groups and the Al-Qaeda.

It is impossible to convince Pakistan or at least its military that after gaining Afghanistan in whole or in part, the Taliban/ Al-Qaeda will gun for Pakistani nukes, aided by insiders in the Pakistan military, intelligence and atomic establishments. Indeed, the ****** terrorists are united in their aim to establish a nuclearized caliphate in the whole region, in which targeted assassinations of modernists like the murdered Punjab governor, Salman Taseer, constitute decisive steps. Who will now dare to confront the fundamentalists on the blasphemy law?

But without an equally resolute counter-movement towards pluralism, Pakistan will self-destruct and become a piece of real estate for the caliphate jihadists. In these caliphate plans, Saudi Arabia is an active though inadvertent partner, funding the ****** and indigenous Pakistani terror groups to keep Wahhabi militancy away from its shore.

And powers like China, which seek to gain from Indo-Pak tensions, have plunged Pakistan further down the vortex of destruction. Pakistan is at a critical cross-roads. It either returns to the however imperfectly and cynically arrived secular ideals of its founder, Jinnah, overcomes his bitterness against India, and sets about remaking and reinventing itself, or Pakistan travels down the present road to annihilation. Salman Taseer has secured a place in history by going down for a great cause.

N.V.Subramanian is Editor, The Public Affairs Magazine- Newsinsight.net, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi). Email: envysub@gmail.com.

 

[scrumpy]

Let me as a common Indian give my views on the assassination.

In my view, Taseer had the guts to stand up for a poor woman who was accused of something which was plainly wrong in my eyes. His views resonates with my views on the subject. Note that I may not have agreed with him on other points but on this point, I am cent percent with him. In my view, the lady is on death row for flimsy reasons.

Taseer was killed by a fanatic for his view point on the blasphemy law. This was an attack aimed at people with this same view point. Since I share the same viewpoint, I view this as an attempt to silence me with violence. That is why the assassination hurts me a lot more then say what happened to Benazir Bhutto.

Most other people in the world have a similar viewpoint. That is why his death is being talked about so much.