The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Many, including myself, are disheartened by the assassination of Salmaan Taseer. He had emerged, specifically through Twitter, as somewhat of a laissez-faire secularist. I want to stress this “Twitter” angle. Given the lack of a civil society where dialogue and discourse can transcend class boundaries, Taseer found a way to circumvent “drawing room politics” where men and women gathered on uncomfortable and ostentatious furniture to discuss “the people”. I am quite willing to bet that his strident defense of secularist, pluralist policies emerged because of the feedback loop that Twitter provided. As a subscriber to his feed for a while, I witnessed numerous exchanges with reporters, authors, business-owners, students where he asserted, and was pushed back on, not only government policy but a liberal world-view which needed defense or it needed affirmation. He was abandoned by his own party and largely by the provincial government after his defense of Asiya Bibi. The Zardari regime found it best to not challenge the Islamist parties and their reticence only exacerbated the loneliness of the Taseer and Sherry Rahman position – that the Blasphemy Laws were targeting religious minorities.