by OMAR WARAICH
Speaking up for minorities came easy to Salmaan Taseer, the Governor of Punjab who was brutally assassinated by his own bodyguard last Tuesday. Half a century before he took up the cause of Aasia Noreen, a poor Christian woman facing a death sentence for blasphemy that she never committed, Taseer and his childhood friends resolved to protest the death sentence of Jimmy Wilson, a poor African-American.
“It was outrageous that he was going to be hanged for stealing a mere dollar,” recalls co-conspirator Tariq Ali, the left-wing writer. Along with a third friend, the teenage subversives mounted a “Free Jimmy Wilson” demonstration to the US Consulate General in Lahore. But halfway there, Ali realised how few of them there were. Shrewdly, Taseer devised a fix. Somehow he swiftly gathered an excitable crowd of street urchins to make up the numbers. “They didn’t even know what they were protesting about,” says Ali, guffawing at the memory.
The Independent for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)