Strikers in Pakistan Show Kashmir Muslims Support : Asia: The government-backed action demonstrates solidarity with those battling Indian rule.

A government-backed general strike in Pakistan paralyzed businesses, bazaars and factories Saturday as Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her citizenry demonstrated massive solidarity with fellow Muslims battling Indian rule in Kashmir.

“The shutdown is total,” Razia Bhatti of the current affairs magazine Newsline reported by telephone from Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and home to 6.7 million people. “Everything is closed.”

In the port city on the Arabian Sea, thousands of irate demonstrators burned Indian leaders in effigy and tried to storm India’s consulate, but were kept several blocks away by rings of barbed wire and a cordon of jeeps equipped with machine guns.

At one point, police armed with rifles and metal-covered batons waded into the crowd and opened fire with tear gas.

Halim Saddiqi, an opposition lawmaker in the National Assembly, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that police resorted to the gas without being provoked by demonstrators. At least four activists were injured, and there were some arrests.

Public buses and rickshaws stood idle in Karachi, and workers’ hotels, tearooms, offices, shops and industries shut their doors.

The one-day strike was similarly observed in the rest of the country, news reports said. In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, hundreds of protesters burned tires outside the Indian Embassy, reports said.

In the frontier city of Peshawar near the Khyber Pass, demonstrators reportedly demanded a holy war to liberate Kashmir.

A message issued by Bhutto said Pakistan would continue to extend all moral, political and diplomatic assistance to the people of Kashmir to allow them to achieve their goal of self-determination.

On the Indian side of the frontier, a large and hostile crowd assembled at the border checkpoint at Wagha, about 100 yards from Pakistan, to denounce the neighboring country’s “conspiracy” against India and reject charges of widespread human rights abuses in Kashmir.

M.S. Bitta, president of the youth wing of India’s ruling Congress-I Party and organizer of the counter-rally in Punjab, accused Bhutto of supporting anti-Indian terrorism, and blamed the United States and Pakistan for whipping up trouble in Kashmir and Punjab.

“If you are really moved by the suffering people are undergoing, then save your tears for the poor, hungry and exploited mass of women and children in your own country,” Bitta said in an open letter to Bhutto. News reports said up to 30,000 people came to shout anti-Bhutto slogans and to burn the Pakistani leader in effigy.

About two-thirds of the old Himalayan principality of Kashmir is controlled by India, with the rest in Pakistan’s hands. Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only state where Muslims are in the majority, and its status has long been the chief bone of contention in Indo-Pakistani relations.

A recent U.S. State Department report on human rights in India found abuses in Kashmir to be “particularly acute.” Militants and civilians are summarily executed, and often are tortured while in custody, it said.