LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami has begun moving its anti-petroleum levy protest out of Lahore and into other cities, with Emir Hafiz Naeem-ur-Rehman announcing that camps have already opened in Hyderabad and that a sit-in will begin in Balochistan on August 29.
Addressing participants at the Lahore protest site on Monday, the JI chief said the party had started sit-ins in several other areas, including Hyderabad, and that protest demonstrations were held across Balochistan on August 22 ahead of the sit-in due to start there at the end of the week.
The announcement converts into action the phased roadmap the party set out over the weekend, when Hafiz Naeem-ur-Rehman tied the end of the Lahore occupation to the complete withdrawal of the petroleum levy and outlined a sequence running from an open-ended sit-in, to a shutter-down strike after 12 Rabiul Awwal, to protest camps in other cities, and finally to a long march on Islamabad. The move to Hyderabad and Balochistan is the third stage of that sequence arriving earlier than the party’s own timeline implied.
The JI emir accused the federal government of taking money directly out of household budgets, saying the party had exposed what he called the plunder of the rulers. He said heavy taxation, including the levy, was falling hardest on low-income earners, and put the amount collected through levies at more than Rs 8,000 billion.
He warned that the levy must be abolished, and said that if it was not, the government would fall.
Alongside the street mobilisation, the party is opening a second front online. Hafiz Naeem-ur-Rehman appealed to the public to visit markets, photograph and film goods being sold at inflated prices, and circulate the material with a call for others to join the sit-ins. A social media storm, he said, would keep the rulers awake.
He also announced that a list carrying the signatures and names of millions of people would be compiled and presented to the world as evidence of public opposition to the levy.
The approach spreads the campaign’s cost. A sit-in requires bodies at a fixed location; a price-documentation drive lets supporters in cities without a camp participate from their own neighbourhood markets, and produces a running visual record of inflation that the party can point to without relying on official figures.
The JI chief widened his economic case beyond fuel, criticising independent power producers and the capacity payments made to them, and alleging that the government had entered into illegal agreements with IPPs.
Capacity payments — the fixed amounts paid to IPPs whether or not their electricity is used — have become one of the most contested items in Pakistan’s power tariff structure, and their inclusion signals that the party intends to keep the campaign running on energy costs broadly rather than the petroleum levy alone.
The expansion comes after the party publicly rejected a federal invitation for talks in Islamabad and a proposed ministerial negotiating committee, with Hafiz Naeem-ur-Rehman insisting that any negotiations take place at the sit-in venue itself and address the abolition of the levy rather than procedural arrangements.
Petrol currently stands at Rs341.59 per litre and high-speed diesel at Rs368.29, following a steady climb through August. No response from the federal Petroleum Division to the latest announcement had been reported by Monday night.
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