WHERE is liberal Pakistan? Its fading light may have been snuffed out by the assassination of a leading progressive politician and critic of extremism, Salman Taseer.

Mr Taseer, who had been leading a lonely fight to repeal Pakistan's pernicious blasphemy law, was gunned down in daylight in central Islamabad on Tuesday January 4th by one of his own police security guards. The killer later said he acted because of Mr Taseer's campaign against the blasphemy law. The 66-year-old governor of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, had taken up the case of a poor Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who was condemned to death for blasphemy late last year.

The law, introduced in colonial times but given venom in the 1980s by the fundamentalist dictator General Zia-ul-Haq, is open to abuse. Dozens of people are convicted each year, though hearsay is often used as evidence and accusers invent verbal transgressions.

Mr Taseer's killer, Mumtaz Qadri, may have acted alone—an investigation to determine this has begun—but his cause has support in Pakistan. Following the assassination, a broad alliance of the country's clergy issued a statement condoning the murderer and lionising his assassin. “No Muslim should attend the funeral or even try to pray for Salman Taseer or even express any kind of regret or sympathy over the incident,” said Jamaate Ahle Sunnat Pakistan, an organisation that represents the moderate Barelvi sect, the mainstream branch of Islam in the country.

The murder will certainly cow and intimidate Pakistan's political leadership, which had taken fright at Mr Taseer's stance well before his murder. Indeed, Mr Taseer's own Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which leads the government, had not backed his call for the blasphemy law to be repealed.

The PPP government, which was already weak, lost a key coalition partner over the weekend, leaving it as a minority administration. The party has been badly shaken by the murder, which recalls the assassination of the PPP's leader, Benazir Bhutto, in 2007. Though its manifesto committed it to seek reform of the statute, the party is too busy with its struggle for political survival to pick a fight over the blasphemy law. Pakistan's other pressing problems, including an economy in a tailspin and a raging Islamist insurgency, will also have to wait.

Update: On January 7th the MQM announced it would return to the government which, as a result, now has a majority again. But this comes at the expense of a planned hike in the price of petrol that would have cut government subsidies, something that Pakistan badly needs to do.