Steven L. Gardiner

Recently (March 11, 2016) the New York Times published an Op-Ed by novelist Aatish Taseer (“My Father’s Killer’s Funeral”), son of Salmaan Taseer, the former governor of the Pakistani Punjab who was assassinated by one of his bodyguards in the early days of 2011.

The killer, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero of sorts in Pakistan, a cause célèbre for a significant portion of the population—mortifying and infuriating to others. Many may remember that Governor Taseer was murdered because he came to the defense of a Christian woman, Asslya Noreen—or as she is often referred to, Asia, or Aasia, Bibi—who was convicted under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws and sentenced to hang.

Salmaan Taseer spoke in Noreen’s defense and more broadly questioned the blasphemy laws themselves. For this offense to the sensibilities of a vocal group of Pakistanis—no one really knows how large—he was despised, threatened, and eventually assassinated. Never denying his act, Qadri was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to hang as well. He attracted a substantial following for having done nothing remarkable either before or after murdering the man he had been contracted to protect. The size of the following became apparent at his funeral, when upwards of 100,000 people crowded the streets of Rawalpindi, making it the perhaps the largest funeral gathering for a private individual in the history of the country.

In his Op-Ed Aatish laments what this large turnout, in the wake of so much extremist bloodshed in the years that have intervened between his father’s murder and his murderer’s funeral, says about the radicalization of Pakistani society. Indeed the fact that Qadri could be convicted, that all appeals and requests for amnesty were denied, was considered by many to be a victory for sanity and the rule of law.

The whole series of events, from the original blasphemy accusations through to Qadri’s funeral, are dispiriting for anyone who cares about Pakistan. Having spent a year teaching and doing research in Lahore—an old and beautiful city barely 30 miles from the village where Noreen was accused of blasphemy—I count myself in that number.

That some people of whatever background are willing to take advantage of sketchy legal mechanisms to target an outsider is hardly surprising. Wherever you find yourself, there are vindictive persons willing to take such actions. (It’s one of the reasons why laws related to speech are so deeply troublesome, even setting aside the idea of “free” speech.)

That the governor of the most populous province in a nuclear-armed country of 200 million should be the target of an assassination for pointing out the likely spuriousness of the charge against Noreen—as well as the shaky ground of the Pakistani blasphemy laws—is also understandable. That is, so long as we imagine a lone fanatic.

That a man like Qadri became a hero to many? That is painful to accept.

The angry and alienated in every country flock to unlikely causes and make celebrities out of non-entities who happen to echo their rage back to them, allowing them to drown out their uncertainties and anxieties and bask in a feeling of superiority—no matter how bad things get in the as a result or what brutalities come to fruition.

Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani Prime Minister who was herself assassinated, reportedly once said that to be a politician in her country you have to be willing to risk your life. A reality she was more than intimately familiar with, since her own father Zulfikar Bhutto—also a Prime Minister in his time and the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party—was hanged by the military government of General Zia ul-Haq (who himself died while still in office).

In Pakistan, where trust in public institutions is virtually nonexistent, politics by murder, by pseudo-mob, by gang fights between the hired thugs of one boss or quasi-fuedal lordling or another are commonplaces. They are expected. Military intervention in the nominally democratic process is recurrent—and both dreaded and yet somehow also welcomed: the army is seen as the one institution able to bring order to a country that is almost ungovernable from the center.

And now I have to think about my own country—the United States of America—which if it is not quite ready to fall apart, is at least flirting with the kind of politics that leads down that road. Let me be clear—I am not talking about the Chicago protestors who shut down a Trump rally. Tactically some may argue that this “escalation” is bound to lead to more of the same—particularly with Trump egging his supporters on. The Chicago shutdown was not about violence, but about people making themselves heard over the voice of a megalomaniacal bully propped up with a personal fortune. Chicagoans showed they were not afraid—and they could in many ways afford to do this because their strength was real.

It would be a mistake, however, to reason by cliche in the naive hope that bully Trump will back down now that he’s been stood up to. Even if that worked on the playground—and frankly I wouldn’t give it better than 50-50 even there—it doesn’t work with a guy who can send other people to do his dirty work. There are so many ways this can get worse—and very few indeed for it to get better. The deeper issue is what Pakistan knows only too well: once the writ of the state, supported primarily not by guns and spies and drones but by the more-or-less willing consent of the governed, starts to break down, it’s very difficult to put on the brakes.