Business centres shut down all over Pakistan: thousands rally over blasphemy laws

Business centres shut down in Pakistan on Friday in a strike called by religious parties to pressure the ruling party which is scrambling to stop its main coalition partner from pulling out of the governing coalition. Religious parties called the action to protest against what it believes are plans by the government to change the country's controversial blasphemy law.
Thousands of supporters of religious parties rallied in towns and cities across the country to support the law. "We will not allow the government to bring about any change in the blasphemy law. If it tried to do so, we would send it packing," Hafiz Hamdullah, local leader of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) party, told supporters in Quetta.
A loose alliance of over a dozen religious parties, many of them pro-Taliban, announced the general strike on December 15, a day after the JUI pulled out of the coalition after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani sacked one of its ministers. All major markets and business centres were closed in the capital Islamabad as well as in the cities of Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta. Public transport was not running in Karachi. Police fired tear gas at dozens of protesters in Karachi but no one was injured.
Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), which broke with the coalition, and other religious parties don't have much electoral clout. But they have enough influence to fire up emotions in Pakistan, where frustrations are growing over poverty, poor government services, rampant corruption and many other issues.
Pakistani leaders can't afford to ignore them. Demonstrators said their goal was to defend the honour of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). "We will start a civil disobedience movement if the government makes any amendment to the law," the chairman of Sunni Ittehad Council, Sahabzada Fazal Karim, told AFP. Samsam Bokhari disassociated the government from the bill to amend the law, saying it was not policy.
"As far as the party is concerned, the law is not being amended, nor does the government intend to bring any change in it," he said. Protest rallies were held across Pakistan, and in Karachi police fired around a dozen teargas shells to disperse about 100 demonstrators who wanted to walk past Zardari's house.
Police official Naseer Tanoli told AFP the protesters were going to join the main rally in the town but had tried to pass the President's home en route. "We asked them to use a different route we had assigned for it. But they refused and pelted stones on the police, which forced us to use teargas," Tanoli said, adding that the demonstrators had dispersed.
Around 5,000 people rallied in the city, carrying placards and banners inscribed with anti-government and anti-US slogans with some chanting "Death to America". Shopping centres, colleges and universities were closed, and examinations scheduled for Friday in Karachi were postponed. The president of Karachi's local transport association, Irshad Bokhari, told AFP that public transport would remain off the road as part of the strike.
Chairman of the All Karachi Traders Unity Atiq Mir said: "All markets and business centres are closed because the protection of Prophet Mohammed's honour is supreme to us." Shops and business centres were also shut in Islamabad and Peshawar. More than 2,500 activists from different religious parties held three protest rallies in Multan, where a shutter-down strike was observed and markets and bazaars were closed, an AFP reporter said. Hundreds of protesters rallied in other main cities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southern Balochistan. In Lahore, some 1,500 people participated in four separate protest demonstrations, an AFP reporter said.