By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is hurtling towards one of its tensest political confrontations in years, with the government erecting a virtual fortress around Islamabad and Imran Khan’s party vowing to march on the capital regardless, even as three of the jailed former prime minister’s sisters remain in detention.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) said on Monday it would press ahead with its planned protest on 27 September, dismissing a wave of arrests targeting its lawmakers and supporters as an attempt to intimidate the party into standing down.
Speaking at a press conference at the Chief Minister’s House in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister Sohail Afridi said a meeting of the party’s parliamentary committee had resolved to “forcefully exercise” its constitutional right to peaceful protest. He accused the authorities of deploying plainclothes men to “attack and abduct” provincial labour minister Fazal Shakoor Khan, and of attempting to kidnap communications minister Shakeel Khan in Batkhela, in Malakand division. Rather than weakening the party’s resolve, Afridi said, such tactics would only strengthen it.
The chief minister’s remarks came a day after Aleema Khan, one of Imran Khan’s sisters, was taken into custody at her home in Lahore, with two more sisters, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi, detained shortly afterwards. All three have been detained under the Maintenance of Public Order law, with the deputy commissioner of Lahore issuing a 30-day preventive detention order in Aleema Khan’s case, and the arrests have been challenged in the Lahore High Court. They have since been transferred to Kot Lakhpat Jail.
Afridi went further in his account of the family’s treatment, telling reporters that “all three of his sisters were abducted” the previous day and accusing what he called “this oppressive government” of responsibility for the deaths of party workers going back to April 2022, when Imran Khan was removed from office in a no-confidence vote. He said PTI remained the country’s most popular party and Imran Khan its most popular leader, and pointed out that the party had not staged a long march or protest rally outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the nearly two years since its previous demonstration in November 2024 ended in violence and multiple deaths.
A capital under lockdown
The government’s response has been to turn Islamabad into what critics are already calling a “container city”. Islamabad Police has sought more than 1,000 containers for use at the Red Zone, the high-security zone and major entry and exit points, with more than 600 already arranged or requisitioned and welding crews reported working overnight to join the barricades together, making them harder to dismantle. All routine leave for Islamabad Capital Police has been suspended until 5 October, under a circular from the Inspector General of Police.
Reinforcements are being pulled in from across the country. Police sources said around 1,950 officers and personnel from Sindh were due to arrive in Islamabad by Tuesday night, while Punjab is understood to be sending roughly 19,000 officers over the following two days, after the federal government requested 23,000 personnel from the province. Accommodation for the Sindh and Punjab contingents, as well as Frontier Corps personnel, has reportedly already been arranged.
The crackdown follows a ruling from the Islamabad High Court that political parties, political leaders, provincial governments and public officeholders have no lawful right to occupy or obstruct public roads, highways, interchanges, toll plazas or government buildings, and which directed authorities to safeguard citizens’ access to roads, workplaces, businesses, hospitals and educational institutions.
Interior minister Mohsin Naqvi has taken an uncompromising public line, declaring that no group will be allowed to enter Islamabad on 27 September, and that the government will stop any march on the capital “in every possible way”, holding its organisers personally responsible for any loss of life. He has said Islamabad will not be allowed to remain shut down for ten or twenty days because of a protest, and that a “permanent strategy” is being formulated to prevent repeats of past disruption. At a press conference in Lahore, he dismissed talk of PTI storming the capital from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as “theatrics”, claimed a majority of the party’s central leadership privately opposed the march, and cautioned that “you cannot achieve anything through such theatrics; anyone attempting to storm Islamabad will face severe consequences,” urging the party not to head into “a dead end from which there is no way back.” He has said the government would implement the Islamabad High Court’s orders in full should PTI proceed.
“We are not terrorists”
PTI’s interim chairman, Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, used his own press conference in Peshawar to reject any suggestion that the party posed a threat to public order. “Are we terrorists? We are being told that we will be dealt with like terrorists,” he said. “We are political figures, and we will not arrive like terrorists.” He said the party was not marching on Islamabad to conquer the city or turn it into “Somnath”, and insisted that when it arrived, “the supremacy of the Constitution and the law will prevail” in an atmosphere he described as one of festivity rather than confrontation, adding that PTI would never take the law into its own hands.
Barrister Gohar put the number of detained party workers at 1,500, with lists reportedly being drawn up for further arrests. He said five members of the National Assembly, a former senator, several members of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly and sitting provincial ministers had been detained, arguing that the scale of the crackdown showed that although PTI held office in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, “someone else was calling the shots” in the province. Islamabad Police confirmed the arrest of MNA Adil Bazai, taking to six the number of detained PTI lawmakers in the capital, alongside Senator Saifullah Niazi and MNAs Sanaullah Masti Khel, Mian Ahsan Jamal, Dawar Kundi and Ghaus Muhammad, all held under Section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order ordinance and moved to Jhelum Jail. PTI’s Central Media Department separately said MNA Fatehul Mulk, the member for Chitral, was also detained, and condemned the “indiscriminate use of state power” in arresting elected representatives from Parliament Lodges and from outside the National Assembly itself.
Barrister Gohar rejected any suggestion PTI was courting violence, saying the party had approached the high courts 25 times and the Supreme Court 19 times over the past four years to resolve its grievances through the legal system, without success. “We have raised our voice in both Parliament and Senate, and what are we asking for? We are only asking for justice,” he said, naming the party’s central demands as medical treatment for Imran Khan, proper hearings for his outstanding cases and permission for family meetings. He noted that fourteen long marches had been allowed to proceed unimpeded during PTI’s own time in government, and that the party had not been permitted to hold one anywhere in the country in the four years since it lost power. He said the party had not severed contact with the federal government and that channels of communication remained open, but that no substantive talks had yet taken place. “They must step back, and we will do the same,” he said. “But when one side tries to impose its will, that cannot work.”
Calls for talks
Amid the standoff, opposition figures have pressed for dialogue. Senate opposition leader Allama Raja Nasir Abbas said negotiation remained the only viable route out of the crisis and urged Mr Sharif to establish a committee bringing empowered representatives of government and opposition together, saying the opposition’s door remained open. He has also said only Imran Khan himself can postpone the march, a position he said he raised directly with Mr Naqvi in a meeting the interior minister had requested.
The Tehreek-e-Tahafuz-e-Ayin-e-Pakistan, an opposition alliance that includes Mr Abbas, condemned Aleema Khan’s arrest and the wider crackdown on political workers, parliamentarians and ordinary citizens, and called on the government to release all those detained and remove the containers blocking public roads. It said Imran Khan had been unjustly jailed and that the women in his family were now being targeted for what it characterised as political revenge, warning that meeting peaceful political activity with arrests and road closures would only deepen the crisis.
PTI first announced its intention to march on the capital last month, saying it would assemble a central convoy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to be joined by caravans travelling from other parts of the country before converging on Islamabad. The party has said it will announce further details of the route and timing on 25 September. Imran Khan has been in detention since August 2023 and faces a string of separate criminal cases, which he and his supporters describe as politically motivated.
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