Prankster and Pakistani patriot: Aatish Taseer’s dad Salmaan was a man of many selves

Modi govt revoked author and journalist Aatish Taseer’s OCI status because he ‘concealed’ that his father Salmaan was Pakistani.

Salman Taseer | Image: Arindam Mukherjee | ThePrint

New Delhi: Salmaan Taseer knew he was a marked man. His daughter Sanam, a barrister-turned-gallerist who has lived most of her life in Lahore, tells ThePrint that he used to often say that the subcontinent would be plagued by assassinations and that he was the No. 1 target in the Pakistani province of Punjab, of which he was the governor.

“But we didn’t think it would actually happen,” Sanam says. “The sad thing is that right up until the end (when he was assassinated by a member of his own security detail in 2011 for his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy law), he was hopeful. I think none of us, in our liberal bubble, realised how alone he was in his fight, and how deep the anti-liberal elite sentiment ran.”

Salmaan Taseer is back in the headlines, after India’s Ministry of Home Affairs revoked the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) status of his biological son Aatish, on the grounds that he concealed details of who his father was, and his Pakistani ancestry, in his Person of Indian Origin (PIO) application.

T.C.A. Raghavan, former High Commissioner of India to Pakistan, tells ThePrint the rules about OCI and PIO status are very clear — if you have Pakistani or Bangladeshi ancestry, it needs to be mentioned upfront. He also says Aatish is not the first person to be denied the status on grounds of ancestors’ citizenship.

But Aatish’s case is a unique one. The well-known author and columnist was born in 1980 out of a relationship between Salmaan, a prominent businessman and Pakistan People’s Party politician, and Tavleen Singh, an Indian journalist. The two did continue their relationship in a way when Tavleen informed him of her pregnancy, but Salmaan left them when Aatish was only two, severing all ties with Tavleen and their son. Born in London, Aatish grew up in Delhi under the sole guardianship of his mother.

In May this year, he wrote the cover story for Time magazine — a piece on Indian PM Narendra Modi, calling him the country’s ‘Divider-in-Chief’, a fact that the MHA claims has nothing to do with his OCI status, stating that the rules about hiding one’s ancestry are clear. Aatish has, in fact, written extensively about his father and his attempts to have a relationship with him later in life, notably in his book Stranger To History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands.

“In a sense, being seen and treated as a Muslim because my father was Muslim constituted the biggest part of whatever Muslim identity I had. My father was also Pakistani, but that didn’t automatically make me Pakistani, even in the eyes of Pakistanis. But being Muslim was a different matter.”

— Aatish Taseer, ‘Stranger To History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’

The book details his attempts to understand Islam and his attempts to have a relationship with his father, including a visit to Pakistan in 2002, the first time the two met in 20 years.

“In the old-fashioned colonial offices on the other side, the reception was warm. They read the name in my passport and asked, unprompted, ‘This is the People’s Party Salman Taseer?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered.”

— Aatish Taseer, ‘Stranger To History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’

So the question remains: Who was Salmaan Taseer?

A liberal secular Muslim Pakistani patriot

He was, according to Sanam (his daughter from his first marriage), all of those things. “When we were growing up, it was possible to be all of these things; they were not mutually exclusive. My father would often call himself a ‘cultural Muslim’ (a term Aatish also credits to him in his book) — not someone who followed the faith to the letter at all, but was a proud Pakistani patriot.”

“To me, that was the most interesting aspect of the letter: my father, who drank Scotch every evening, never fasted or prayed, even ate pork, and once said, ‘It was only when I was in jail and all they gave me to read was the Koran — and I read it back to front several times — that I realised there was nothing in it for me,’ was offended as a Muslim by what I had written.”

— Aatish Taseer, ‘Stranger To History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’

It’s not too surprising, given Salmaan’s own heritage. Born in 1944 in Shimla to M.D. Taseer, a poet and professor, and Christobel George, a British woman who converted and became Bilquis, Salmaan went to school and college in Lahore, before heading to London for a degree in chartered accountancy.

His first cousin, Salima Hashmi, an artist and former professor, tells ThePrint, “Salmaan was a year younger than me and we were very close. We were kids of two English mothers and two prominent poets (her father was the renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and her mother, Alys, was Christobel’s sister). When his father died very suddenly of a heart attack, Salmaan was only around seven years old, and then the year after that, my father was sent to jail. Our grandparents were keen that we go back to England, but our mothers said no, this was our home. So it was a very rooted, committed sort of upbringing.”

She recalls that even in those admittedly hard times, there were picnics and movies. “And Salmaan, as the only boy among the cousins, was the darling of the family. He was extremely bright and extremely naughty, always playing pranks.”

In fact, it seems strange to think it, but the abiding memory Sanam and Salima have of this knife-sharp businessman, committed liberal activist and politician is that he was the funniest person in the room, incredibly witty and wicked, with a knack for impressions. “After he passed away,” says Salima, “I found two letters he had written to my father when he [Faiz] was in jail. They are hilarious! So full of jokes, because he wanted to cheer up his uncle. I got copies framed for his kids.”

Years later, after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution in 1979, Salmaan himself was imprisoned in Lahore Fort and tortured, but even then, he never spoke of it to his family except, well, to joke about it.

Perhaps he was able to wear it all lightly because he didn’t have the baggage that came with being from a political family. An entirely self-made man, he spent his twenties in London investing in shares and focusing on building a business. “We used to laugh at him, because we were never a family that had a lot of money. We were not from the landed gentry or a big business family. I was in art school while he was so serious about saving and investing, and we’d say ‘What do you think, you’re going to become a millionaire?’ But he did it, and he earned every cent,” Salima says.

It’s the same focus that saw him take to activism and politics. “Growing up,” says Salima, “there was always an awareness and understanding of the importance of politics in our lives, so in a sense it was not surprising when Salmaan, who was a great admirer of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had even written a biography of him, joined the Pakistan People’s Party [back in the 1960s].”

He won the Punjab Assembly seat from Lahore in 1988, but lost the next three elections. He was the interim federal minister for industries, production and special initiatives for a year before, in 2008, being designated the governor of Punjab.

Raghavan, who served in Pakistan from 2003 to 2007 as well, met Taseer on occasion and remembers him as an extremely talented writer and successful businessman, and someone who “stood for a liberal and enlightened Pakistan”.

He was incredibly brave, says Salima, and clear about his vision of a liberal Pakistan.

The assassination was a blow to liberal Pakistan

The position of a liberal Pakistani in today’s times is an interesting and complicated one. The country itself was founded on the basis of religion, so where do non-religious Pakistanis stand, how do they navigate ideas of patriotism, tradition, culture, politics and personal choice? Where does it leave the liberal Pakistani?

Raghavan remembers that from 2007 to about 2014 or 15, “Pakistan went through a very bad phase in terms of terror attacks. So the assassination of Salmaan, in the heart of Islamabad, was a huge blow — to the state of Pakistan as well as to the liberal circles.”

Sanam Taseer agrees. “I was 35 when my father was killed, and honestly, I was a bit naive until then, I didn’t realise how polarised things were. You see, Zia-ul-Haq was a terrifying figure — he even looked like a monster — and no one we met socially liked him.” Is that a fallout of the liberal echo chamber? Sanam admits it probably is.

“My father was this larger-than-life guy — he’d walk into a room and completely command everyone’s attention, young, old, it didn’t matter. He was a central figure in Lahore’s liberal society, this maverick, this charming raconteur, full of banter and wit. So when he was killed, it was a huge shock to us all, who I suppose, on some level thought we were immune.”

Raghavan believes the role of the liberal elite in Pakistan has been steadily diminishing over time, and Sanam agrees. “Liberals have no hold on the Pakistani imagination anymore, no power.” But, she adds, she does see an emerging and growing middle class that is genuinely and deeply liberal. She recalls that there was a poor young artist she worked with who went around town putting up posters in support of Salmaan. “He was braver than any of us in the family.”

On Salmaan as a family guy and the whole OCI business

Sanam explains that when she and her siblings were growing up, Salmaan was in and out of jail, fighting against the military government, and the family was constantly filing habeas corpus petitions. Did she ever just want a normal life with a normal dad? “Not at all, we were all so proud of him! Even in school, people used to tell us that they really admired him and it made us feel good.”

“It was during the years that I was growing up in Delhi that I had my first questions about my father, but like so much else about that early absence, they were lost in confusion and laughter. One day, my second-year teacher telephoned my mother, concerned that I was suffering from some kind of emotional disturbance. When my mother asked her why she felt this, she said I showed a tendency to tell wild, obviously untrue stories. My mother pressed her and she said she had asked the class what their fathers did for a living and I replied, ‘My father is in jail.’ ‘It’s absolutely true,’ my mother said, and left it at that.”

— Aatish Taseer, ‘Stranger To History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’

He was an extremely liberal dad, Sanam says, reminiscing about how he was “super-involved in our lives, from school and grades to boys — I used to go to him for relationship advice.”

Salima wells up as she recalls how indulgent and caring he was towards her and her husband. “Whatever you need, whatever you want, you just tell me, he would say. Yes, he had a complicated personal life [with both his marriages and the six kids from them, plus other relationships and, of course, Aatish]. But he made it a point to make each child feel special.”

She admits that that was obviously not the case with Aatish, but given the Indian connection, she says, “that relationship came with its own baggage, which he didn’t discuss with the family. His relationships were his business and it was not my place to ask about them.” She herself shares a very cordial relationship with Aatish and Tavleen, though.

And Sanam is extremely close to Aatish, as is her entire side of the family. She’s shocked by the MHA’s revoking of his OCI status, recalling that recently, Aatish stayed with her while writing a profile of Imran Khan. “This was also an unflattering piece, but at no point were we ever afraid of reprisal of any kind. But then, in Pakistan, the government is fair game — everyone is free to say what they like about it. It’s speaking up against the Army that’s dangerous.”

Sanam is not sure why this one article sparked such “vendetta”, but believes it is perhaps to do with the Indian government’s obsession with Western media and how it portrays Modi. She says, “One of the reasons my father was pro-Partition was that he felt there was a latent anti-Muslim feeling in India… But he would feel disgust and fury at this kind of treatment of an OCI.”