Pakistan’s Sherry Rehman stands alone after colleagues’ assassinations

Civic activists say it is the secular coalition government’s duty to galvanize demonstrators to counter the 40,000 Islamists who rallied here in January against changes to the blasphemy laws. Rehman disagrees, saying any government in the volatile country would be unwise to foment even peaceful street protests.

Islamist groups have long exploited fundamentalism to gain power in Pakistan, Rehman said, adding that the hysteria they whip up always cools. Then again, she acknowledged, the violent militancy now engulfing the country is far more dangerous than political opportunism.

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(Anjum Naveed/AP) - Pakistani lawmaker Sherry Rehman, shown here in 2008, is the country’s only remaining vocal advocate for amending blasphemy laws. Two other notable critics of the harsh laws have been killed.

“Other than appeasement, what’s the plan?” she said.

Rehman is no stranger to threats. When former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s convoy was bombed in Karachi on her return from exile in 2007, Rehman was in the car, and her back still bears burn scars. When Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack weeks later, Rehman escorted her body to the hospital.

“Being scared no longer works,” Rehman said. “The physical attack happens, and you keep working the next day.”

Rehman, a former editor of a leading Pakistani newsmagazine, the Herald, joined the National Assembly in 2002. She became information minister in 2008 but resigned a year later to protest the government’s curbs on TV stations that had criticized it.

But Rehman has remained in Parliament, and she says it is there that the battle for ideas can be fought. While pushing for bills against domestic violence and sexual harassment in the workplace, she said, she has seen politicians from religious parties compromise. She said the main task now should be righting the faltering economy, which fuels extremism.

“Tolerance is the big issue,” Rehman said. “But the government will have to deal with how people are facing the next day and getting the next meal.”

Rehman said she sees hope amid the frenzy. Clerics call with words of support. The Pakistani media, which fanned public outrage against Taseer before his assassination, have largely left her alone.

And after allegedly calling Rehman a “non-Muslim” in January, an imam who preaches near her house retracted his words after a journalist filed a complaint that could have led to incitement charges. That shows “the removal of impunity does work,” Rehman said.

Still, the imam was not punished, and clerics in other parts of the country continue to say Rehman deserves death.

“This is a sobering moment,” she said. “It may get worse before it gets better. But it has to.”