THE governor of Punjab Salman Taseer has been murdered and his immediate killer, a policeman in his security detail, has been arrested. But the story of Mr Taseer’s assassination only begins there. The governor of Punjab had been an outspoken critic of the blasphemy laws and he paid the ultimate price for his rejection of the cancer of intolerance that has aggressively eaten away at this country for over three decades now. But when Mr Taseer was targeted by ultra-conservative elements of society for his stance, what was the response? The state stood silently by, ignoring the fatwas and the threats to the Punjab governor. When small-time clerics announced head money and other ‘rewards’ for ‘blasphemers’, no one was prosecuted or punished. It appears that in Pakistan if anyone decides to preface their arguments with the flag of Islam, however wrongly or cowardly, the state will just stand by and advise ‘tolerance’ and ‘understanding’. But there can be no tolerance for intolerance, no understanding of that which is patently criminal. The silence in the face of the ferocious verbal assault against Mr Taseer almost certainly emboldened those who meant him genuine harm. Even more depressing, his own party, the PPP, the party with apparently secular credentials, did not stand up in support of their own governor of the largest province of Pakistan.

The role of a section of the media, particularly the vernacular media, has also been malignant. Staggeringly, in the immediate aftermath of Mr Taseer’s murder, pundits on TV news channels were talking about the ‘untold’ story of ‘American state terrorism’ and how Mr Taseer had taken the ‘unprecedented’ step of being associated with a ‘guilty criminal’, Aasia Bibi, the Christian woman whose recent blasphemy conviction sparked the latest debate over Islamic laws introduced by Gen Zia. But the media’s culpability stretches further back. The coverage given to a couple of obscure Peshawar and Lahore clerics who announced a reward for the murder of Aasia Bibi was extraordinary, and extraordinarily irresponsible. Projecting such ‘news’ from irrelevant figures masquerading as religious ‘leaders’ onto the national radar, without regard for possible repercussions, was an abject abandonment of media ethics.

With Mr Taseer’s death, the question haunting this country in recent years has come back with force: where will the path this country is on lead it to? It ought to be depressingly obvious. If Pakistan and Pakistanis do not try and excise the cancer within, the future of this country is very bleak indeed.