Religious protesters have put Pakistan’s government on the defensive

RIZWAN AHMAD says he has everything he needs for the long haul. The 20-year-old has swapped his austere madrasa in Sukkur, a city in Sindh province, for a makeshift camp beside a motorway outside Islamabad, the capital, nearly 1,000km (620 miles) to the north. He has bedding, warm clothes, food and shelter. Anything else, God will provide. Tents, tarpaulins, food stalls and solar panels to charge mobile phones are laid out among rows of men bent in prayer.

Mr Ahmad is one of around 50,000 protesters who, led by a veteran Islamist called Maulana Fazlur Rehman, descended on Islamabad late last month. The orange-turbaned leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) party stirred up religious students to demand the resignation of the prime minister, Imran Khan. “If the maulana says ‘Go home tomorrow’, we will go home tomorrow,” explains Mr Ahmad. “If he says ‘Stay a year’, we will stay a year.”