Taseer’s daughter challenges blasphemy law in Pak

“These extremists,they want to tell you how to think,how to feel,how to act,” said Taseer. “It has made me more resolute that these people should never win.”

Salmaan Taseer was assassinated on January 4. The confessed killer,Mumtaz Qadri,boasted he had carried out the slaying because the politician wanted to change blasphemy law that impose the death sentence for insulting Islam.

“For everyone else it was the governor and their leader and this man,and it was this big,sexy story and it was so sensationalist. But for me,it was my father,” Shehrbano Taseer said. Taseer majored in government and film at Smith College in Northampton,Massachusetts,and is by profession a journalist.

Taseer’s followers on Twitter often receive notes that criticise Pakistan’s discriminatory laws,especially blasphemy claims that have reached the courts since her father’s death.

Unlike many politicians,she’s also willing to criticise the role Saudi Arabia has played in funding numerous hardline Islamist schools in Pakistan.

Taseer is frustrated with the Pakistani justice system’s delays in processing the case of Qadri. She wants the former bodyguard to spend his life in solitary confinement. A death sentence is “too easy,” she said.

“In Pakistan,we have few brave and honest leaders,” she said of the political atmosphere. “We need our heroes alive.”