KARACHI: Friends and colleagues of rights activist Sabeen Mahmud, who was shot dead on April 24, gathered at the Arts Council Karachi to pay tribute to her at an event titled ‘Unsilence Pakistan’ organised by Concerned Citizens for Peace on Saturday evening.

Sabeen’s friend and mentor Zaheer Kidvai said he had known her for 26 years. She was 15 years old when she first came to him to “learn computers” where she fell in love with a Macintosh computer. He claimed that if she liked doing something, she would take it to extreme levels.

He said she was only 17 years of age when she came to work at his office. He had to go to Hong Kong on an official trip and left the office to her. When he came back after a month he saw that she had completed all the tasks, including one of retrieving money from different companies.

Kidvai said Sabeen was fond of music but when she met him she didn’t know much about classical and jazz music. He introduced her to jazz and she liked it so much so that whenever she travelled abroad, she would get recordings of jazz music.

He also narrated the story when Sabeen met Dr Eqbal Ahmed for the first time and both had an hour-long discussion after which she decided never to leave Pakistan.

Journalist Fariha Aziz talked about the Cyber Crime Bill and said when the issue was first raised by concerned citizens, it was T2F (Sabeen’s brainchild) where a programme to highlight the proposed bill’s effects was arranged.

Journalist and novelist Mohammed Hanif began his speech by drawing the attention of the audience to the title of the event, ‘Unsilence Pakistan’, and wondered whether it was a step forward or backward from a couple of earlier events captioned ‘Unsilence Balochistan’.

Speaking on the problems existing in the media industry, he said he once met the owner of a media organisation who had come up with a TV channel. He asked him why he did that when it wasn’t even an overly lucrative business, to which he replied that it gave him “political influence”.

On the dangers faced by journalists, Hanif reminded the audience of Maulana Salahuddin, the editor of a religiously inclined magazine, who was murdered and to date no one knew who killed him. After his murder, he said, journalists’ deaths became a regular feature.

He mentioned the attack on Hamid Mir’s life because, according to Mir himself, he had given coverage to the issue of Balochistan. In the end Hanif quoted the late Razia Bhatti who once told him that though the media couldn’t be free, journalists could. And Sabeen Mahmud taught many of us how to act like a free individual, he added.

Poet Fahmida Riaz pointed out how powerful non-state actors had become in the country. She termed the killing of religious minorities (Shias, Ahmedis) unacceptable. She said the army was fighting the war on terror and had lost many of its soldiers.

Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy spoke on the National Action Plan. He said one of the points of the plan was to punish those who were making hate speeches. The government had claimed that it had arrested 75 of them, but, he said, there were thousands of clerics who were doing that and no one could do anything about it. In that regard he mentioned the name of Maulana Abdul Aziz of Lal Masjid.

Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur said when Bhagat Kabir died, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all claimed that he was theirs; Sabeen was like that.

Bonded labour activist Veeru Kohli recalled the time when Sabeen took part in her campaign.

Amar Sindhu, I. A. Rehman and Sounds of Kolachi were also on the programme list. Fawwad Khan performed a skit.

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2015

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