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Twenty-seven.
That’s the number of bullets a police guard fired into my father before
surrendering himself with a sinister smile to the policemen around him.
Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province,
was assassinated on Tuesday – my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday –
outside a market near our family home in Islamabad.

The guard accused
of the killing, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, was assigned that morning to
protect my father while he was in the federal capital. According to
officials, around 4:15 p.m., as my father was about to step into his
car after lunch, Qadri opened fire.

Qadri and his
supporters may have felled a great oak that day, but they are sadly
mistaken if they think they have succeeded in silencing my father’s
voice or the voices of millions like him who believe in the secular
vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

My father’s life
was one of struggle. He was a self-made man, who made and lost and
remade his fortune. He was among the first members of the ruling
Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in
the late 1960s. He was an intellectual, a newspaper publisher and a
writer; he was jailed and tortured for his belief in democracy and
freedom. The vile dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take
kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy.

One particularly
brutal imprisonment was in a dungeon at Lahore Fort, this city’s
Mughal-era citadel. My father was held in solitary confinement for
months and was slipped a single meal of half a plate of stewed lentils
each day. They told my mother, in her early 20s at the time, that he
was dead. She never believed that.

Determined, she
made friends with the kind man who used to sweep my father’s cell and
asked him to pass a note to her husband. My father later told me he
swallowed the note, fearing for the sweeper’s life. He scribbled back a
reassuring message to my mother: “I’m not made from a wood that burns
easily.” That is the kind of man my father was. He could not be broken.

He often quoted
verse by his uncle Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Urdu’s greatest poets. “Even
if you’ve got shackles on your feet, go. Be fearless and walk. Stand
for your cause even if you are martyred,” wrote Faiz. Especially as
governor, my father was the first to speak up and stand beside those
who had suffered, from the thousands of people displaced by the Kashmir
earthquake in 2005 to the family of two teenage brothers who were
lynched by a mob in August in Sialkot after a dispute at a cricket
match.

After 86 members of
the Ahmadi sect, considered blasphemous by fundamentalists, were
murdered in attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore in May, to the
great displeasure of the religious right my father visited the
survivors in the hospital. When the floods devastated Pakistan last
summer, he was on the go, rallying businessmen for aid, consoling the
homeless and building shelters.

My father believed
that the strict blasphemy laws instituted by Zia have been frequently
misused and ought to be changed. His views were widely misrepresented
to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet
Mohammad. This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility
by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to
happen. According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the
blasphemy law was what drove Qadri to kill him.

There are those who
say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant
Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we
buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others. This week
two leading conservative politicians – former Prime Minister Chaudhry
Shujaat Hussain and the cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan –
have taken the same position my father held on the blasphemy laws: they
want amendments to prevent misuse.

To say that there
was a security lapse on Tuesday is an understatement. My father was
brutally gunned down by a man hired to protect him. Juvenal once asked,
“Who will guard the guards themselves?” It is a question all Pakistanis
should ask themselves today: If the extremists could get to the
governor of the largest province, is anyone safe?

It may sound odd,
but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he
had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands,
improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential.
He lived and died for Pakistan. To honour his memory, those who share
that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice.
We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.

Shehrbano Taseer is a reporter with Newsweek Pakistan

© 2011 The New York Times