On Twitter, Glimpses of a Slain Pakistani Governors War on Religious Fanatics
By ROBERT MACKEY
Updated | 1:32 p.m. As my colleagues Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall report, the governor of Pakistans Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot and killed by one of his guards on Tuesday.
Mr. Taseer had recently waged a very public campaign to save the life of a Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistans blasphemy law and his assassin was reportedly angered by the governors outspoken support for changing that law, despite the objections of Islamist leaders.
Pakistans interior minister, Rehman Malik, told reporters: The police guard who killed him says he did this because Mr. Taseer recently defended the proposed amendments to the blasphemy law. This is what he told the police after surrendering himself.
Through his frequently updated Twitter feed, Mr. Taseer was a tireless combatant in Pakistans online culture war, between secular liberals and religious conservatives, and his death was both mourned and celebrated on blogs and social networks.
In an emotional post on the blog Pak Tea House, Yasser Latif Hamdani, a Lahore lawyer, wrote:
The bastards have murdered the one honest man in the whole shameful lot of bigots, fascists and idiots
Today is a most tragic day for Pakistan, for sanity and for humanity. Salman Taseer was MURDERED by religio-fascists.
Mr. Hamdani added that the governors killing had laid bare
the whirlpool of religious violence and extremism we are stuck in.
From the other side of the political spectrum, a Facebook page was set up to praise the gunman and drew more than 2,500 fans in a matter of hours, as David Kenner reports on Foreign Policys Passport blog.
Jahanzaib Haque, a Web editor for Pakistans Express Tribune newspaper, wrote on Twitter: We have 50% comments coming in praising the guard
busy deleting them
I feel sick.
As the BBC journalist Mishal Husain noted soon after Mr. Taseers death, readers unfamiliar with the governors willingness to take on what he called Pakistans religious right can scroll back through his recent updates on Twitter to get a sense of the man.
Three days ago, for instance, after street protests against proposed changes to the blasphemy law, Mr. Taseer pronounced himself:
Unimpressed by mullah rightest madrassa demo yesterday: small numbers abusive well organised no general public support
In an update posted on New Years Eve,
Mr. Taseer declared that even though he was under huge pressure from the right to stop pushing for changes to the blasphemy law, he had no intention of doing so. Even, he added, if Im the last man standing.
A few days earlier,
referring to messages from other users of the social network calling for his death, Mr. Taseer suggested that they should be filed under: Example of a sick mind.
On Christmas Day he wrote:
Merry Xmas to all Christian brothers and sisters all over Pakistan. We respect ur patriotism & great role u have played building Pakistan.
The evening before, he seconded the observation of another Twitter user who wrote, we live in a country where [the] mullah brigade can get away with murder but minorities are persecuted on frivolous charges. Mr. Taseer added:
My observation on minorities: A man/nation is judged by how they support those weaker than them not how they lean on those stronger.
Covered in the righteous cloak of religion and even a puny dwarf imagines himself a monster. Important to face. And call their bluff.
In other notes posted in the weeks before his death, Mr. Taseer compared the struggle over the blasphemy law in Pakistan with the struggle against extremists by people like Rosa Parks, called a conservative media tycoon a psychotic nut, and attacked Islamist clerics who support suicide bombing. In the clipped slang of Twitter, Mr. Taseer wrote to the clerics running religious schools, or madrassas:
My advice 2 mullahs who r telling little madrassah boys that they have a ticket 2 heaven: Grab it urself or give it 2 ur son.
Mr. Taseer also used Twitter to alert his followers to remarks he made about the Islamist lunatic fringe in an interview with Pakistans Newsline on Dec. 23, in which he said that the countrys blasphemy law is a man-made law, not a God-made one.
In the same interview, Mr. Taseer explained that he had taken up the case of the Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy because
this is a blatant violation against a member of a minority community. I, like a lot of right-minded people, was outraged. He added:
The real problem is that the government is not prepared to face religious fanaticism head on. This also gives us a bad name in the world.
Mr. Taseers feed was not exclusively devoted to tweaking Islamists, though. He also used it to joke about cricket (by suggesting that Pakistans successful blind cricket team might be cheating), to poke at his Indian followers and Indias prime minister and even to make light of the strain placed on diplomatic relations by the leaked U.S. cables. The week the first cables were published he wrote:
Having a small dinner tonight 4 new U.S. Ambassador Cameron Muenter & Marlyn his wife. Try not 2 discuss Wikileaks.
On Twitter, Glimpses of a Slain Pakistani Governor's War on Religious 'Fanatics' - NYTimes.com
