RAWALPINDI/LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman has said the government has failed to deliver relief to the public and that a system built on oppression and mafias must be changed, in twin appearances that escalated his party’s nationwide protest campaign.
Addressing a public meeting at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi, and separately holding a press conference in Lahore, the Jamaat-e-Islami ameer warned of a long march on the federal capital if the party’s demands are not met.
Hafiz Naeem said Jamaat-e-Islami workers had defeated every tactic used by the administration to obstruct the rally. He recalled announcing the previous day that if the gathering was not permitted, the roads of Rawalpindi and Islamabad would be filled, and congratulated workers on holding the meeting at what he called a historic site.
Invoking the venue’s history, he said Shaheed-e-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated at that location and that decades later the killers of the nation’s benefactors have still not been arrested. He said Asif Zardari had also been unable to apprehend the killers of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at the same site, and alleged that when the nation rejects rulers they are installed in power through “Form 47”.
Criticising the government, he said the present rulers can provide neither health nor any other facility to the nation, and that this “mafia” can deliver only affliction rather than relief. Rulers were handing the public electricity and petrol bills and inflation as gifts, he said, adding that Shehbaz Sharif was being used only to raise prices.
He said his party’s member of the National Assembly had presented a bill for the public hanging of perpetrators in connection with the Zainab case, but that the government had abandoned the bill in order to placate the United States.
At the start of the sit-in campaign, he said, it was claimed that workers would soon disperse — yet Liaquat Bagh was full and sit-ins were continuing in cities across the country, with people joining protests in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta and Chitral among other areas.
Jamaat-e-Islami, he said, is a peaceful party that believes in peaceful struggle, has no personal agenda and does not practise politics of personality or dynasty. Public problems should be resolved, he warned; otherwise the rulers would be unable to manage the situation once a long march is called. If such a call is given, he said, people will converge on Islamabad from all four directions “like ants”, and if an announcement is made to overturn the government, the rulers “will not even get an airlift”.
His demands were relief for the public, abolition of the levy, and cheaper bread and electricity.
Speaking in Lahore, Hafiz Naeem said a historic struggle in the form of sit-ins and protests had begun across the country, and that awareness and political consciousness were being generated at hundreds of locations.
Despite movement in the international market, he said, petrol is not being made cheaper. This is not a representative government of the people, he said, but “Form 47” people, and extortion is being collected from the poor in the form of the levy.
He said the federal government’s own expenditure has reached one trillion rupees while load shedding is at its peak, and that no official vehicle should exceed 1300cc.
Jamaat-e-Islami could hold prolonged sit-ins in Lahore as well, he said, extending an invitation to all political parties to join. If anyone attempted to remove the party from its sit-in, he added, “let them fulfil their wish.”
The petroleum levy is the substantive economic grievance underneath the rhetoric, and it deserves to be stated plainly for readers. Because the levy is a fixed per-litre charge rather than a percentage tax, it does not fall when international crude prices fall. That is precisely why pump prices in Pakistan have decoupled from global benchmarks — and why Hafiz Naeem’s specific claim, that petrol is not becoming cheaper despite market movement, lands with an audience that experiences it at the pump every fortnight. The levy is also, from the government’s side, one of the few revenue instruments that reliably collects, which is why successive administrations have raised rather than reduced it.
Jamaat-e-Islami’s electoral share does not match its street mobilisation capacity, and the party knows it. Its strategic calculation, visible in the 2024 Rawalpindi sit-in over electricity bills, is that sustained non-violent occupation of urban space extracts policy concessions that seats in the National Assembly do not. That earlier campaign ended in a written agreement with the government; whether this one follows the same arc will depend on whether the finance ministry has any fiscal room to move on the levy — and under current commitments, it has very little.
The reference to Liaquat Bagh is not incidental. Staging the rally at the site where both Liaquat Ali Khan and Benazir Bhutto were killed is a deliberate claim on a lineage of unresolved political violence, and it is being used to argue that the state does not deliver justice to its own. It is effective symbolism. It is also, as political rhetoric, a claim rather than a finding, and readers should treat it as such.
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