Pakistan’s Shahbaz Taseer’s memoir offers a glimpse into a painful personal ordeal & the factional mujahideen world

Shahbaz Taseer. (Photo: Twitter)

Lost to the World: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Five Years in Terrorist Captivity (2022, Penguin), the first person account of one of Pakistan’s most high-profile and dreadful kidnapping victims has two major strands of narrative flowing through the text. The first is, of course, the painful ordeal, to put it mildly, that Shahbaz Taseer went through; the second is the simple, but powerful glimpse into the faction-ridden world of the various mujahideen groups operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Shahbaz, the son of Salman Taseer, the slain governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was kidnapped in August 2011, in Lahore when he was on his way to his office, and came home a free man only in March 2016.

'Lost to the World: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Five Years in Terrorist Captivity' (2022, Penguin) by Shahbaz Taseer.

“There were mornings I did not want to get up, I just wanted to take my own life,” says Shahbaz, as he recounts how his kidnappers would pull out flesh from his back, rub salt on his wounds, bury him in the ground, rip out his finger nails, sew his mouth, and shoot him in the leg. “The physical pain I can explain and describe, but the mental torture I can’t,” he tells me over a video call, sitting in his office in Lahore.

It all began on August 26, 2011.

A block away from his office, Shahbaz was accosted by men waiting in a car, armed with pistols and Kalashnikov. He was hurriedly bundled in the car, and soon enough it dawned on him that it was not a case of robbery, but something far more sinister. “I have come for you, Shahbaz,” Muhammad Ali, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) told him after the capture. Just seven months earlier, in January 2011, a police bodyguard using his AK-47 assault rifle had brutally shot dead Salman Taseer, incensed by the liberal politician’s opposition to the blasphemy law which is known to be used against Hindu and Christian minorities in Pakistan.

Now, the family was faced with another tragedy. And to add insult to injury, Muhammad Ali’s ransom demand of $45 million included the release of 30 prisoners in Pakistan, including Taseer’s killer Mumtaz Qadri. The gory description of ransom videos and phone calls to family members brings out the gruesome inhumanity of his Uzbek kidnappers, who administered ketamine with unfailing regularity to keep Shahbaz’s faculties diminished, his existence ephemeral. And although they did keep him in Lahore for a few days soon after his kidnapping, he was ultimately taken to the outlands of Pakistan where groups like the IMU recruit their foot soldiers.

Within the thick layers of the gloom and doom, lie few (relative) oases of comfort. During his incarceration, Shahbaz developed a rapport with one of his guards, who smuggled a radio for him to listen to BBC football commentary as they both supported Manchester United. Getting caught would have meant at least 50 lashes, but the guard took a risk for Shahbaz. Ironically, the person who caused Muhammad Ali to desist from torturing Shahbaz was Ali’s mother-in-law. And it was Ali’s kids who reminded Shahbaz that a human face was capable of a smile.

Our conversation is littered with constant reference to his sheltered and privileged upbringing to which he has now (thankfully) returned. Business and pleasure trips to Dubai, US and Europe, armed guards, expensive watches, bevy of cars, loving family — four years of captivity had made all of it a hazy memory.

While he ducked drone attacks and sought shelter from aerial bombardments, the world had seen Homeland, mobile phones became far more common and cheap, his siblings got married and shockingly one of his kidnappers was deported from a migrant camp in Norway (where he sought refuge) and had returned to Waziristan. But he tells me that there was one concern that always occupied his mind. That was the fate of Mumtaz Qadri.

“The universe works in mysterious ways. The same hour that Mumtaz Qadri was hanged on February 29, 2016 after fajr (morning) prayers is the exact time when I escaped from the Taliban prison in Afghanistan. This is God given divine justice. I used to pray to God — take my life, but don’t let this man walk to his freedom. If that had happened, even my freedom would have meant walking to an eternity of captivity.”

I ask him what he made of the fairly large support Qadri enjoyed in Pakistan. “In a country of 240 million people, the presence of a hundred thousand people at his funeral is what it is. We are a conservative and religious country, but not an extremist society. We have the madrasa system, which is unwatched, but the vast majority of Pakistan would support the stand my father took. The people and the group who support Qadri are creation of vested interests that use them to oppose or prop political parties they want,” says Shahbaz forcefully.

Shahbaz’s grandfather was MD Taseer, who is considered among the earliest from the subcontinent to have completed a PhD in English literature from University of Cambridge in 1936. MD Taseer and his close friend renowned Urdu poet and author Faiz Ahmad Faiz were married to English ladies who were sisters. I was reminded of that progressive streak when Shahbaz finished his take on Mumtaz Qadri while telling me: “There is a video of Mumtaz Qadri sitting in some majlis of being indoctrinated by a maulvi, who is now doing Ramzan transmission on local TV channel, so this reflects in some ways the complicity of the state.”

Shahbaz may have escaped from a Taliban prison in Afghanistan, but how exactly he went there? What was the IMU? How did his savage kidnappers reach the fate they threatened him with? What happened to the lady and children who provided him some semblance of normality? Why did he assume the identity of Yusuf Britannia a foreign-born jihadi just before his escape? Lost to the World provides all the answers, but the most intriguing part is the one name that ultimately opened the door to Shahbaz's freedom. One name!

In the 1954 Bimal Roy classic Naukri, Kishore Kumar lands up in a police station lock-up because he is unable to name the company that offered him a job. Kumar desperately tries to recollect the unusual name to explain to the cops, who arrest him with a ruffian, that he is a law-abiding youngster newly arrived in Bombay to take up a job. After a night in the lock-up, he tells the inspector the company’s name: Kikubhai Gendaram Behramji Batparia, and walks away to freedom in the morning. After struggling for days, Shahbaz in an epiphany recalls the name he was asked for, to win his ticket to freedom. The comparison with Kishore Kumar may be crude, but Shahbaz’s over four years of captivity is truly nothing short of a celluloid drama.