Salman Taseer

He was born on 31 May 1944, in Shimla, British India, to a mixed-race family.[19] being of Kashmiri descent on his father's side[20] and of English descent on his mother's side.[21] His father was Muhammad Din Taseer (M. D. Taseer), who hailed from Ajnala near Amritsar,[22] 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.[21]

Taseer's father died in 1950 at the age of 47, when Taseer was only six years old.[23] Taseer and his two sisters were brought up by their mother in relative poverty, in an environment with very strong Christian influences, and a general absence of immersion in local Pakistani culture, because his mother kept no contact with the relatives of her late husband.[24]

Taseer attended St. Anthony's School, a school run by Christian missionaries in Lahore, where he was a classmate of Nawaz Sharif.[25] He then obtained a degree in Chartered Accountancy from London.[25]

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.[28] He was a part of the movement for Bhutto's freedom and opposed his arrest and death sentence.[28] He also wrote a political biography on Bhutto titled Bhutto: A political biography (1980).[28] Taseer was also known to be one of the trusted aides of Bhutto's daughter and political heir, Benazir Bhutto.[25]

In the 1988 general elections, Taseer became a member of the Punjab Assembly from Lahore.[28] In the 1990, 1993 and 1997 general elections, he stood for election to be an MNA but lost.[28] In 2007, he was appointed the interim Federal Minister for Industries, Production and Special Initiatives.[28] 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.[29] Evidence provided by ICAO on the governor's travel abroad led to a case being filed in court for breach of the constitution.[30]

Taseer set up several chartered accountancy and management consultancy firms early in his career.[31] 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.[31]

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.[31] A majority stake in Worldcall was acquired in 2008 by Omantel, the Sultanate of Oman's incumbent operator.[32] Taseer also owned an English news channel in Pakistan, Business Plus; and the first children's channel, Wikkid Plus;[31] and was the publisher of the English language Daily Times.[31]

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.[33]

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,[34] near his home[35] 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.[12][34] 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."[36]

The next day, just hundreds of people turned up for his funeral in Lahore in spite of denunciations by some Sunni clerics and religious scholars against mourning Taseer.[37][38] 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.[39] Taseer was buried at a military cantonment in Lahore.[40]

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. He reportedly pleaded to be arrested.[41] After the murder, more than 500 clerics voiced support for the murder and urged a general boycott of Taseer's funeral as he suported a blasphemer.[42] 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.[43] 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.[44][45]

• Official website
• Salman Taseer at Find a Grave
• Salmaan Taseer at Flickr
• Salmaan Taseer at Twitter