Islamists hail ousting of Pakistani minister
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani Islamists celebrated their victory over the government yesterday after the country’s law minister resigned, caving in to fundamentalist protesters who have been demanding his ousting in a three-week-long rally.
After Zahid Hamid’s resignation, the Tehreek-i-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah party, which was behind the sit-in in Islamabad and protests in other cities and towns across Pakistan, said they were dispersing peacefully under an agreement with the government.
The development underscored how a small Islamist party was able to pressure the Pakistani government and force it to accept its demands through a protracted standoff that started earlier in November.
The Islamists had demanded Hamid’s resignation over an omitted reference to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in a parliamentary bill. He apologised for the omission in the bill, saying it was a clerical error that was later corrected.
But the Islamists persisted, taking to the streets and setting up their Islamists in other Pakistani cities and towns, leading to what could have been a major political crisis that could have paralysed cities.
Hamid, the law minister, submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi late on Sunday after security forces held back from another attempt to disperse the protesters, three security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to talk to the media.
Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal told the chief justice of the Islamabad High Court, Shaukat Sadiqui, yesterday that the government signed an agreement with the rally organisers to avoid a “civil-war like situation”.
Islamabad-based analyst Imtiaz Gul described the outcome of the stand-off as a “retreat” by the state. He said Saturday’s crackdown “was miserably planned and poorly executed”. “This operation was launched by thousands of security forces against Islamists and it ended up with the state’s retreat,” Gul said.