Aatish Taseer’s father Salman Taseer was a proud Pakistani and defender of 2-nation theory

As Modi govt revokes Aatish Taseer’s OCI card over his Pakistani roots, here’s what Shekhar Gupta wrote in January 2011 about his politician father Salman Taseer after he was assassinated.

Salman Taseer | Image: Arindam Mukherjee | ThePrint

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 so much as mentioned Kashmir, he would pounce on it as if somebody had bowled one short outside Inzamam ul-Haq’s off-stump.

By remembering him merely 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 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 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.

(This article was first published in January 2011.)