'Taseer's liberal voice will not be silenced with his death'

The daughter of Salmaan Taseer, the slain Punjab governor, says her father "lived and died for Pakistan", and that his liberal voice will not be silenced with the passing away of this "heroic man."
"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," Shehrbano Taseer, wrote in an op-ed piece published in Sunday's New York Times.
She said that Mumtaz Qadri, who was hired to protect governor Taseer, pumped 27 bullets into his body before surrendering himself "with a sinister smile" to the policemen around him.
"Mr. 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 General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy," Ms. Taseer wrote in the article, entitled: My Father Died for Pakistan.
In her article, Ms. Taseer, a reporter for Newsweek in Pakistan, describes the hardships her father underwent when he was jailed by Zia's regime, the solace he provided to the Ahmadis wounded in bomb attacks, his dedicated relief and rehabilitation work in the 2008 Kashmir earthquake and last summer's devastating flood. She also referred to his efforts to change the blasphemy law so that its provisions were not misused.
"His views were widely misrepresented to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him). This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to happen." Ms. Taseer wrote, "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."