Pakistan rights activist Sabeen Mahmud’s murder hits too close to home

The traditional World Cup cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan is celebrated with silly, juvenile slogans like “mauka, mauka”. Now India and Pakistan are also competing in another category - stifling and even silencing brave, liberal voices that dare to ask uncomfortable, forbidden questions that are only whispered in fear.

Well, Pakistan has still not beaten India in a World Cup cricket game, but with the brutal murder of Sabeen Mehmud in Karachi Friday evening, Pakistan has its nose ahead in this game, for now.

It has also become a cliché of sorts to say that the landscape for an open discourse is shrinking today. In Pakistan, that space lies shattered.

I first met Sabeen in Karachi in 2012 when she invited me to speak at a conference. A fiery, yet affable woman, she introduced me to the Karachi audience before my stand-up comedy session. Normally a stand-up comedy routine has an opening act that warms up the audience. Sabeen was no comic, but till date hers was perhaps the best opening act I’ve ever had. Sabeen introduced me not just to the audience at the conference, she opened a window to a Pakistan that offered a powerful counter-narrative view to what Indians normally are made to consume and visualise about our neighbour. That drew me to the country again and again.

A lot of young students and professionals at T2F (as The Second Floor is called endearingly) were mentored by her to become determined agents of change in a city that is scarred by unrelenting violence and ethnic divide. Today my heart goes out to these people because now it will require extraordinary courage to continue her work in this climate of fear. Sabeen was not just a liberal voice, she was an institution builder. T2F was her baby: An eclectic, warm and welcoming space for art, culture and an unfettered political expression. It represented an open ideology, free of dogma and bigotry. It was a safe space for some not-so-safe ideas. One could just sit there the whole day, order chai or coffee, read, write, chat and engage with artistic work. Sabeen would be milling about, minding her own business, but her presence at this lively, free-flowing place could not be missed.

T2F holds a special place in my heart. This was the only place where I gave my stand-up performance actually sitting down, casually on the floor - with Sabeen sitting in the audience and smiling.

To learn that a person like Sabeen was fatally shot five times, point blank outside a place like T2F, is heartbreaking. It goes against everything she tirelessly worked for. “Unsilencing Balochistan (Take 2)" was the event she organised after which she was silenced. A few minutes ago, I saw a friend's post on her Facebook wall, saying, "My messenger shows, you were active six hours ago". Active she was in every possible way and meaning. But now her funeral will start at her beloved T2F.

Three liberal voices at that conference in 2012 have been the target of violent attacks. Journalist Raza Rumi survived a gun attack in Lahore, but lost his young driver; activist Irfan Khudi Ali, a young Hazara man, perished in a bomb attack in Quetta. And now Sabeen has gone forever.

We in India often feel insulated by such incidents. We shrug such news with callous attitude; "Oh, it’s their problem". Dare I say we are no different?

Who killed Sabeen, is not difficult to guess, especially after her last event about missing people in Balochistan. The state machinery in India has often, under the garb of fighting terrorism and defending national security, muzzled inconvenient voices and manufactured political situations to its favour.

Sabeen's murder is too close. Indeed, too close to home. There is an adage: "If there is a fire in your neighbour's house, know that it will spread to yours too."

I write this as I prepare to attend a memorial service for her in New Delhi, and join her funeral in Karachi via Skype.

Today, I mourn the loss of a friend and a neighbour!